


i wonder, it's frightening

by carolinaa



Series: I will take it / It can't go wrong. [2]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: (not major but tagging jic), Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir-centric, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Bad Parent Gabriel Agreste, Child Abuse, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Marinette is kind of ripped. that's not a major plot point but i need everyone to know that, Post-Canon, Self-destructive habits, Suicidal Ideation, Support Networks, Teen Celeb Mental Breakdowns, implied/referenced eating disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-09-25 05:17:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20371333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carolinaa/pseuds/carolinaa
Summary: Adrien begins to suspect that he deserves better, despite all evidence to the contrary. It's been two years since the first time he fully stood up to his dad, and maybe it's time to push the envelope a little further. Something in him is curious to see how easily his father will snap.Nothing wrong with some good old-fashioned teenage rebellion, right?(Adrien has no idea what teenage rebellion is. He's making it up as he goes along.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this takes place a couple years after "What am I trying to say?" and you don't really need to read that to understand this, but I mean if this fic sounds like your jam go ahead and read that first! 
> 
> heed the tags for trigger warnings! love u

It’s not until after Paris Fashion Week that year that Adrien puts a finger on why his skin has been crawling almost nonstop for the past few months. 

He’d _thought _it was just because of his creeping suspicion that his secret identity is bound to become un-secret one of these days. Or he thought maybe it was because his baccalaureates were coming up next spring (Nino is joining him in the slow creep of anxiety about these, too, so it wouldn’t be too far off base. As in, he and Nino trailed off into hysterical laughter the other day for a solid ten minutes because they simply cannot process the sheer amount of work that they’re going to have to do to prepare for their exams).

But no. That’s not completely right, is it?

Paris Fashion Week is one of the weeks when Adrien gets followed around the most. He gets stopped on the sidewalk every ten feet, his location gets Tweeted every five minutes, he has to ramp up his social media participation and appearances almost three hundred percent, he has to stream live on Instagram two more hours a day on average. (Adrien _ has _calculated these numbers. Math calms him down.)

It’s when his schedule goes from being split into half-hours into ten-minute chunks. His food plan is printed out and meticulously observed so that he doesn't violate any modeling laws. Nathalie practically moves into his room to keep him on track. 

Adrien doesn’t even connect the dots until his fifth Fashion Week has concluded, and he’s having his annual after-after-party breakdown. He’s shaking and holding his pillow to his chest and staring at the wall and sobbing and basically doing everything he can to shatter the illusion that he’s an adult who will be graduating high school soon.

Plagg pokes and prods and gets him to talk, a little bit. He’s more successful every year, getting Adrien to calm down faster and faster. This year, he cuts to the chase and asks, “Kid, you realize this isn’t normal, right?”

Adrien dry-heaves as a particularly violent sob wracks through him, mixed with an ugly laugh that would get him fired from any commercial. “I do this--every--_ year _, what the hell are you talking about--”

“Kid_ , _” Plagg says, genuine concern in his voice. He hasn’t toed this hard a line in regards to Adrien’s mental state since the incident two years ago, when he actually convinced Adrien to tell an adult or two about his home situation. “Look at yourself! You know, most kids probably don’t voluntarily do stuff they hate!”

Adrien looks at himself. He’s still in the Agreste outfit he’d worn to the gala, which is rumpled and half-unbuttoned and damp in places from his crying, and spreading glitter all over the bed. His makeup, forgotten until now, is smeared on his pillow, likely streaked around his face as well. 

“I don’t hate modeling,” he protests.

Plagg narrows his eyes. “Then what _ do _you hate? Because you’ve been even broodier than normal, this week.”

Adrien has been surprised out of crying, so abruptly that his breath is still hiccupy. “What?”

“I’m asking what you hate so much that burns you out so quickly during Fashion Week.” Plagg crosses his tiny arms, and then when Adrien opens his mouth, the kwami leaps to say, “_ Don’t --! _say ‘myself,’ or I’ll murder you right here.”

Adrien smiles lazily. (As lazily as he can, with snot and tears all over his blotchy, hideous face.) “Little do you know, that’s--that’s exactly what I want.”

The joke falls supremely flat. Plagg looks even more worried. “_ Kid. _”

“Sorry,” Adrien says, and wipes his face. He takes a shuddery breath, and tries to consider Plagg’s question fairly. _ Something _ has him on edge, and _ something _makes him self-destruct after a week of increased--what?

“I guess,” Adrien ventures, voice wobbly. “I guess I hate...being watched.”

Plagg tilts his head in silent encouragement. 

“I hate being _ monitored _ ,” Adrien grudgingly admits. His breath bubbles up again in a half-sob, like his whole body is rioting against the fact that his breakdown didn’t get to run its full course. He wipes his face again, and tries to flatten his hair. Even though he’s in his darkened bedroom at two in the morning, he suddenly feels panicked again, like someone’s going to _ see _him like this. (Like Gabriel is going to see him like this.) “I wish I could just live without people keeping track of me.”

“Okay,” Plagg says. He takes every available opportunity to push Adrien to fuck up Gabriel’s stranglehold on Adrien’s life, appearance, and career, so maybe Adrien shouldn’t be so surprised that Plagg is unabashedly _ delighted _that Adrien has finally admitted this to himself.

“I don’t even want to model for the rest of my life,” Adrien says. “I want to go into physics.”

“Okay,” Plagg says again.

"My dad's literally never going to be proud of me," Adrien is realizing, his stomach sort of sour at the thought of it. "No matter what I do."

"Unless you make yourself totally miserable," Plagg agrees.

Adrien sits up, a weird new feeling in his chest. He _ hates _ people watching him, because they write down everything he does and they keep charts about him and they talk about him behind his back. Shouldn’t he just be allowed to exist? Shouldn’t he be allowed to _ live _without a timer going off every ten minutes, reminding him of what task he should be accomplishing? Shouldn’t he get a choice in how he’s going to spend the rest of his life?

“What are you going to do about it?” Plagg prods.

Adrien looks to him, eyes wide, and smiles a _ real _ smile for the first time that week. Plagg’s right. What’s the worst that could happen, he gets in _ trouble _again?

Adrien’s never in a billion years going to be able to win in a confrontation with Gabriel, face-to-face (two years ago, the last time he stood up to his dad and threatened to tell the press about what was going on, he’d had to do the conversation over the phone. Adrien is older now, and he’s also more reckless, and he’s almost old enough to move out--he needs to take bigger steps). So instead, he calls Étienne at _ Voici _ the next morning. He thinks that, on the heels of Fashion Week, his story will get picked up very quickly. 

“Hi,” he says. “It’s Adrien Agreste?”

“What?” Étienne asks. “The hell?”

Which is fair. Typically, people don’t ask for _Voici _to pick up their stories--it just kind of happens. Or, people don’t directly contact _Voici; _it’s usually a strategic PR decision to reveal a pregnancy or stint in rehab, to drum up interest. Adrien is not in need of any extra interest right now, considering that the biggest week of his year just ended. Also, he is not operating on a very clear plan, and his PR team has not been informed. He’s riding an adrenaline rush and teenage rebellion and a few extra cups of coffee. 

That’s another thing. Étienne is correct to be wary of a teenage model calling him out of the blue, talking at an even faster pace than normal.

“Could you run like, a _ teeny _story for me?” Adrien asks. 

He’s lucky that Étienne is short a piece for his next deadline. The reporter makes Adrien FaceTime, to prove it’s actually him, and then gets written permission to publish the story, because what Étienne _ doesn’t _need is Gabriel Agreste destroying his life with a lawsuit.

“And this was cleared by your team?” Étienne asks one more time, because Adrien keeps dodging the question.

Adrien, out of frame of the FaceTime call, fist-bumps Plagg. “Uh, yeah!”

“Alright,” Étienne says, overwhelmed in the most positive way. “Let me get a few quotes from you.”

It’s meant to be a relatively short interview. Adrien had planned for around fifteen minutes, but the conversation stretches into forty-five before Adrien checks the clock and says, “Shit. Sorry, I need to go.” He’s missed breakfast, and it’s only a matter of time before someone knocks on his door looking for him. 

“Oh! Of course. Thanks for reaching out. The piece should be up on the website before the weekend’s over,” Étienne says, and smiles. “And I think I can squeeze it onto some of the social media posting schedules.”

“Okay!” Adrien gives an earnest smile, and thanks Étienne twice, and hangs up. 

He takes a couple of breaths, to ground himself. “I’m going to be ritualistically murdered by my father,” Adrien tells Plagg matter-of-factly.

“Take him down with you,” Plagg says.

The fallout comes at precisely seven oh eight in the evening the next day, only eight minutes after Étienne’s story is posted on the _ Voici _website. 

Adrien is startlingly calm about all of it. He’s turned on alerts for whenever the website updates (he _ hates _ getting updates from _ Voici _of all places but it had been necessary for him to stay informed), but he’s not checking very frequently. He figures that what happens will happen. It’s not like his dad can yank him out of school right after he gave a glowing interview about how much he loves it. 

The notification comes at seven. He opens the link when it enters his notifications page.

It’s not even a real story. It’s just a short interview, giving a filler update on Adrien’s life; _ Adrien Agreste talks Fashion Week, mental health, and prioritizing his bac studies. _

Gabriel’s going to flip his shit.

It’s really not as hard-hitting as he could have gone for. He doesn’t openly criticize Fashion Week, and he doesn’t delve into the fact that all of his mental health issues are direct results of his upbringing and career. 

(It’s far from being the story that Adrien once threatened to publish--about how his unhealthy eating habits had gotten him hospitalized once ((almost twice)), how his father has broken more than a few laws in an attempt to keep his son under his thumb, how Adrien has video evidence of some painful encounters with his father--you know, the juicy stuff.) 

He just points out that he has other shit going on and he needs some privacy to focus on what’s important. Étienne has done a great job of making Adrien look like a well-adjusted kid who just needs some time to himself.

Well, the article is posted. Adrien, knowing that he had _ minutes _before his father hears the news, kicks back on his bed with a book and breathes. Phase two is about to begin.

Only a minute later, Gabriel _ slams _ into his bedroom, face red with anger. “What. Has gotten. _ Into you, _” he snarls, standing at a very impressive height, towering over where Adrien is sitting on his bed.

Adrien, with composure that surprises both of them, says, “Hmm?”

Maybe “composure” isn’t the right word. It’s more like, Adrien is trying out a new thing where he acts with confidence. And it’s more like, Adrien’s actions are partially influenced by the fact that Paris Fashion Week puts him in a self-destructive mindset and he’s trying to see how far down he can dig his grave before he can lie down in it. Being Chat Noir for so long is making him more and more reckless in his civilian life, but so far, that hasn’t been a bad thing.

Gabriel thrusts his phone towards Adrien’s face. It’s displaying Adrien’s interview, the header picture of which is Adrien from earlier this week, in an Agreste suit. “Did I _ authorize _this?”

“You told me to be more proactive in my studies,” Adrien says, feigning that he has no idea why his father is so upset. His skin is practically thrumming with the amount of nerve he’s showing right now. 

"Excuse me?” Gabriel asks, deadly calm. 

Adrien’s bravado is failing fast, the last vestiges of Chat Noir running for cover under his dad’s steely gaze, but he keeps it together. He _ has _ to. “Uh--well, I thought you wanted me to focus on my studies more. So I just wanted to let everyone know _ for _you, so you didn’t have to make excuses.”

He doesn’t miss the way that Gabriel’s fist clenches and unclenches, like he’s very consciously restraining himself. Still, Adrien pushes just a bit further, digging his grave just a little deeper, before his courage breaks. “I figured it would be more proactive, and easier for you and Nathalie if I made my own schedule from now on. And I can resume modeling duties once my exams are finished.”

Gabriel clearly wasn’t expecting levelheaded reasoning. He’s still unbelievably angry, but he understands the game Adrien’s playing, and something approaching respect clouds his tone even as he starts a lecture. “Your decision to go behind my back was disrespectful to both me and the company. You will not...”

He seems to remember the problem about pulling Adrien out of school. Even if nobody from _ school _told anyone (and Chloe most certainly would), Adrien could still use that information in his growing file of evidence against his father. There are two flash drives, and Tom Dupain-Cheng has one of them in case Gabriel finds one.

Gabriel clears his throat and says, “You will spend the next four weekends at home, studying, and there will be no outings with friends until I am satisfied you are still productive without a written schedule. Give me your phone.”

Adrien nods, perfectly docile. He’s already deleted his public social media accounts (and logged out of the private ones), and his messaging app has a passcode on it so that Gabriel won’t be able to figure out the code without admitting to Adrien that he was trying to spy. As Gabriel had ramped up control over Adrien’s life, Adrien had adapted. Both of them know this. 

“Of course,” Adrien says, and hands over the phone. 

Gabriel’s facial expression doesn’t betray what he’s thinking. He’s schooled it back into something more impassive now, something more detached, and he slips the phone into his coat pocket. 

“Take one step out of line,” Gabriel dares him, in a low voice. His hand flexes again, like he wants nothing more than to smack the airheaded, innocent look off of Adrien’s face. 

Adrien lifts his chin and stares, placid. He hadn’t realized that his father can crumble at confrontation just as easily as Adrien can. “You won’t even know I’m here.”

He starts slipping out of his house earlier and earlier, snatching his bike and riding to school two or three hours before it starts so that the Gorilla can’t catch him around the waist on the way to the garage and manhandle him into the car. 

It’s early enough in the morning that there’s still the sleepy-city feeling around him, crisp air and creeping sunlight that can’t be fully enjoyed in the back of a car. He’s dressed down, in a soft knit sweater and patchy jeans and old Converse that used to be white, and his hair is wild and unstyled, and he feels like a completely different person. If he was in a coming-of-age drama, this would be the triumphant ending montage.

It’s not a movie, though. And Adrien’s still checking over his shoulder and he’s pretty sure the Gorilla is tailing him. And he isn’t completely feeling great, mentally--he’d slipped up and weighed himself the night before, and the results weren’t movie- or commercial-worthy. He’s not in the mood to have his illusion of independence shattered this morning. 

So he jerks his handlebars left, ducking into a sloped, narrow alleyway, and weaves through the city for an hour before reaching his school. 

He greets a few teachers as he rolls his bike into the courtyard. Not all of them are even fully awake yet--he’s still two hours early for his first class--but Adrien’s whole being is running at a thousand clicks a minute, brimming with manic energy. 

His phone rings (his father had given his phone back the next day, and Adrien knows he wouldn’t have found anything incriminating, but Adrien also doesn’t know what his father _ did _to it). He finds that it’s not Nathalie, his father, or even the Gorilla. It’s Chloe.

“Hi Chloe!” Adrien says.

Chloe heaves a deep sigh, and whines, “How are you so cheerful? It’s early.”

“I biked to school,” Adrien says, his voice radiating all the pride of a seven-year-old who was allowed to bike to school by themselves for the first time. 

Chloe doesn’t laugh at how dumb he is to be proud of that. “Are you there right now?” 

“Yeah! What’s up?”

Chloe hums thoughtfully, glossing over his question. “Would you mind if I joined you?”

“I wouldn’t mind at all.”

"I’ll bring breakfast. You haven’t eaten.”

Adrien blinks at nothing, surprised. “What the hell?”

“Watch your dirty mouth. I _ know _you, Adrikins. I’ll have my driver pick us up something on the way. Alright?” 

He also knows _ her _, and knows that she’s having a rough morning. Chloe had dodged his question, and she was willingly getting up early to hang out at school with him, and she’s even buying him breakfast. “Only if you tell me what’s wrong once you get here.”

She sighs again, frustrated. “Hmm. You’d better not be dressed like some commoner again today, though.”

Adrien smiles. “I guess you’ll have to see.”

Chloe arrives a brisk thirty-three minutes later, wearing a new yellow sundress with her hair loose around her shoulders. So a _ really _rough morning for her, then. Adrien offers a friendly smile and a wave, and Chloe sweeps him into a hug. 

“Oh, sweetheart, you look so disheveled,” she says into his shoulder. “I brought pastries and coffee from the Dupain-Chengs.”

“I think it’s really great that you and Marinette get along nowadays,” Adrien says, just to rile her up, and she yanks back and glowers at him. 

Both of them take a quiet moment to catalogue each other’s dark under-eye bags, and tired eyes, and calculated outfits. Adrien knows Chloe would be embarrassed if he mentioned that those things were noticeable about her, and Chloe knows Adrien will be a little sad if she _ doesn’t _notice those things about him. 

“Let’s eat, and then I’ll do your makeup,” Chloe says haughtily, breaking the silence. 

“And you’ll tell me what’s going on,” Adrien says. 

“And you’ll tell _ me _what’s going on,” she counters, poking him in the chest. “We’ve got some catching up to do. You’ve been neglecting me.”

They sit in the locker room, a spread of pastries around them and two cups of coffee resting on the bench. Adrien picks at his food, but Chloe isn’t watching his food intake. In fact, she takes advantage of the fact that he’s not very hungry by asking, “Alright, so is all this about the interview you did?”

Adrien asks, “You read that?”

“Duh,” Chloe says. She rolls her eyes, and brushes flakes of croissant off of her dress. “I’m insulted that you think I wouldn’t. I thought you pulled your punches in it, but it was good.”

“I couldn’t do much more than I did,” Adrien says sheepishly. “My father would have murdered me.”

Chloe scrunches up her nose, carefully not broaching the subject on whether or not she thinks Adrien’s father would actually kill him. It’s not an early-morning conversation to have. “If this interview went so well, are you going to try the big one soon?”

Adrien’s stomach kind of hurts whenever he thinks about doing The Interview with Nadja Chamack. If things get too bad, he’s going to have to do it, and he’s going to have to deal with the legal and social and personal and emotional and physical repercussions of exposing his dad’s awful parenting. 

“I don’t know,” he says, sort of nauseous. 

Chloe nods, analytical. “So, he’s leaving you alone more?”

“Yeah,” Adrien says. 

“And is your idea of ‘freedom’ looking like _ that _?”

Adrien laughs at her. “Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t look _ bad. _ And sometimes it’s fine to look like someone’s perfectly groomed pet, but not _ all _the time.”

“Well,” Chloe says. “I don’t need to know what kind of kinky stuff you’re into, but I guess.”

"What?”

"I’m just _ saying, _” she snorts, “you should still make an effort. Even if you want to dress more...grunge-y. Being complacent isn’t good for anyone.”

She’s finished her breakfast. While she speaks, she balls up the paper bag and throws it into the trash can without even looking before opening her backpack and digging around inside. When she pulls her makeup bag triumphantly out of it, Adrien sets his own pastry down and turns sideways on the bench so that she has better access to his face.

"You’re probably right,” Adrien says.

“Of course I am,” she says. “Close your eyes.”

She brushes eyeshadow onto his eyelids, calm and methodical. When Adrien doesn’t say anything more about how he’s feeling, they lapse into quiet so Chloe can concentrate. 

“So what’s going on with _ you _?” he finally asks, when she’s finishing his eyeliner and it’s alright for him to open his eyes again. 

Chloe waves her free hand around. She’s not dismissive, she’s just trying to find some words. “Nothing, really. Mom called.”

Adrien’s eyebrows raise. Ideally, Chloe’s mother would be calling to apologize for missing Chloe’s birthday last month (Chloe had called Adrien that evening, tipsy and crying, and Adrien was even angrier at Chloe’s mom than usual lately). But, seeing as how Chloe is in pure survival mode right now, the real reason for the call is probably much worse.

“Just to cancel her next visit,” Chloe says, almost a mutter. “I think they’re gonna get divorced.”

“Oh, Chloe,” Adrien says, frowning and sitting up straighter. 

“She didn’t even--want to _ talk _ to me,” Chloe says, her words hitching. Her eyes are getting shinier by the second, and she looks up at the ceiling to blink rapidly before her mascara runs. “Why doesn’t she _ give a shit _?” 

Adrien scoots his mostly-untouched croissant and coffee out of the way, and wraps his arms around her shoulders. She grabs onto him without hesitation. 

“She doesn’t deserve you,” Adrien says. He pats her back, not ending the hug yet. 

“I do _ everything _ to try and show her I’m worth it,” Chloe presses on, like Adrien hadn’t said a word, “but she doesn’t _ care _. She thinks I’m--I’m stupid, and ugly, and--”

“Did she say that?” Adrien asks. His fingers twitch. He knows _ exactly _ how she feels but he’s so far away from solving that problem for _ himself _that he doesn’t know what to say to her.

“I heard her a couple months ago on the phone with Daddy,” Chloe mumbles. She sniffs loudly.

“What the hell,” Adrien says. “Well, at least you know _ she’s _full of shit.”

Chloe laughs, startled. It’s a very wet noise. When she pulls back, he confirms that she’s fully crying now. 

While she works on trying to salvage her makeup, Adrien puts a hand on her knee and says, “You _ know _she’s wrong. You’re incredible.”

“Yeah, I know,” Chloe says, dejected. She’s doing a remarkable job of keeping her eye makeup intact, but she still flaps a hand at him and says, “Thanks for listening.”

“I’m always here,” Adrien says. He doesn’t concede that his father could revoke phone privileges at any time, or that he could be out fighting crime when Chloe needs him. The sentiment is there, even if he feels sort of phony. 

Nino and Adrien walk to a cafe for lunch, and Adrien buys them sandwiches, and they end up back in the school courtyard twenty minutes later to eat. 

Adrien still isn’t very hungry, and Nino has definitely noticed that Adrien’s picking at his food, but neither of them mention it. They’re chatting about the school picture coming up, and he almost feels normal.

“Did you do your makeup?” Nino asks. “Looks good.”

“Chloe did it.” Adrien flutters his eyelashes. “Wish it was enough to make me magazine-ready.”

“Shut up.” Nino rolls his eyes. “Dude.”

“What?” Adrien asks, defensive. 

"I don’t know. Like, you’re still--a good person, and worth people’s time, even if you aren’t ready for a photoshoot.” Nino picks at the grass, and irritably throws a handful at Adrien. “Plus you look fucking hot.”

“Nino,” Adrien says, warmth spreading across his face and ears.

“We don’t all hang out with you because you’re a professional model, or whatever,” Nino mumbles. He’s just as embarrassed as Adrien. “You know you’re more than that to us, right?”

Nino has showed Adrien a hundred times more kindness than Adrien ever expected, and so Adrien _ knows _that Nino means what he’s saying. Still, Adrien isn’t sure he contributes much to a friendship. Even now, four years after starting public school, he’s a little reserved, and he doesn’t respond in the group chat very often, and he can’t hang out much outside of school. But maybe with his new teenage rebellion, he can change that--he can become the person Nino thinks he is.

“Uh,” Adrien says, because Nino is still looking for a response, and then he’s saved by Alya shouting, “_ Nino _!” across the courtyard to get their attention, waving wildly for them to come sit with her and Marinette. 

“Let’s go join them,” Adrien says, and gathers his mostly-intact sandwich and starts to walk over to Alya. “Hey, do you want to sleep over tomorrow?”

“Dude, fuck yeah,” Nino says, and gives Adrien a genuine smile, bumping their shoulders together.

Plagg nudges him, later that evening after patrol when Adrien is drifting off to sleep. “Hey.”

“Whmm?” Adrien says into his pillow. 

“I need to ask you something.”

The kwami sounds extremely serious, which is worrisome for a few reasons. “Okay?” Adrien asks. He turns his head and squints in the dark to find the outline of Plagg hovering in front of him. 

“Are you doing all this for a good reason?” Plagg asks. “Or are you doing it because you want your dad to hurt you?”

Adrien is suddenly much less sleepy. “Sorry?” 

His voice is strangled. He has no idea why Plagg has these sudden insights, sometimes. On some level, he _ is _ doing all this rebellion for the “right reason.” But somewhere lodged in his chest, there’s a voice that sounds an awful lot like Fashion Week Adrien that’s telling him _ it doesn’t matter how much trouble you get in--let him hurt you let him hurt you so badly that the police won’t drop a case against him _. 

“You heard me,” Plagg says. “Your dad isn’t going to like that you’re having a friend over on a school night. Do you just want to do it to make him hurt you?”

“I’m not stupid,” Adrien tells Plagg. His voice is flat, monotone. He’s an awful liar. 

Plagg zips around, agitated. “Kid, I’m not going to encourage this if you’re just trying to kill yourself.”

Adrien snorts, and pushes his face into his pillow again. It’s two in the morning and he’s getting up early to go to a cafe before school tomorrow. “I’m not,” he says. He’s not sure if Plagg can understand him. “If he does anything, I’ll call Nadja.”

“Promise?” Plagg asks.

Adrien just pulls his comforter up over his head, and goes to sleep.

The sleepover goes off without a hitch. He and Nino fall asleep in front of the TV without setting their alarms, and they’re almost late to school and they have to ask the Gorilla to drive them because they’re too far away to walk.

Adrien doesn’t hear a word from his father about it. Adrien, emboldened, takes this as a sign that his father was just waiting for his chance to not give a shit about him anymore.

Once he doesn’t get in trouble for having Nino over, Adrien ramps up his sneaking-out time to an unprecedented level. Besides patrols every night (which he’s realizing now--he adores because nobody knows who he _ is _and he can go wherever he wants), he also leaves during Study Time to take notes in cafes and ride his old bike out to the park. 

Adrien, for the first time feeling like he has real control in his life and not knowing how far he can take it, goes off the rails a little bit.

He asks the group chat, “is anybody free to shop this afternoon,” and within minutes, he has Alya, Nino, and Marinette on board, telling him to meet at Marinette’s because she knows the best places. 

When he ducks into the bathroom and shuts the door to take a quick shower, however, Plagg emerges from a drawer and says, “There’s a new camera in the front hall.”

Adrien stops. He’d told Nathalie he was going to study in his room today, so any coming and going will be cause for interrogation. “What? Where?”

“Outside your room. To see when you come out.”

Adrien opens his bathroom door again and goes across his room, opens the bedroom door, and looks up at the wall outside to see that there is, indeed, a new security camera trained directly on him. 

He closes the door. “Do you know how long it’s been there?” he asks Plagg. Adrien is thinking uncomfortably about the careless way he’d left the house the last couple of days. What if his father decided to comment on what he’d been wearing? What if Adrien had decided to hurry to school as Chat Noir and his father had gotten suspicious when his bedroom door didn’t open before school started?

Plagg shrugs. “A couple days?”

Adrien frowns, and his gaze darts from the open window, to the door, back to Plagg. The Gorilla isn’t stationed here today; he’s by the front door nowadays. (There’s a voice in his head that sounds like Nino that says _ you shouldn’t have to worry about this _.) He runs some quick calculations, and he figures that the worst thing that could happen is that his dad hits him. And Adrien’s taken worse than that from akuma victims, so there’s nothing to fear there.

“I’m going to do something stupid,” he says decisively. Plagg brightens, looking very interested all of a sudden.

Shower forgotten, Adrien opens the bedroom door, walks calmly past the camera’s range of view, and then turns and takes a running leap at it. His right hand connects with the camera at the height of his arc (a recent growth spurt means his arms feel more than a little gangly lately), and he yanks down with all his strength. The brace that holds the camera up cracks, and rips out of the wall, and both Adrien and the camera crash to the ground. 

“Holy shit,” Plagg whispers, just loud enough for Adrien.

"_Hello?_” the Gorilla yells from downstairs. “Okay up there?”

“Uh,” Adrien says, from where he’s sprawled on the ground in the midst of a small pile of rubble. He’s ripped out some of the wall, and the camera is kind of sparking, and the cable is snapped. “Yeah!” In a lower voice, he tells Plagg, “Let’s go.”

“I have no idea what’s gotten into you lately,” Plagg says, “but I _ don’t _disapprove.”

Plagg’s been trying to get Adrien to fully emancipate himself for the last four years, so he probably sees this as personal growth. Adrien smiles, and collects himself calmly, and walks out of his house through the front door, passing the Gorilla on the stairs as the Gorilla goes to assess the property damage. 

“Hey,” the Gorilla calls after him (he doesn’t sound _ angry _ exactly but he’s close enough that Adrien’s pace picks up a notch), but Adrien is already slamming the door behind him and jumping down the front steps.

“How did you get your dad to let you come?” Nino asks, and elbows Adrien.

The two of them are sitting on the step outside the bakery, waiting for Alya and Marinette to emerge. It’s a busy street, and Adrien is trying to find comfort in being in such a large crowd.

“I didn’t,” Adrien says, and sort of laughs. His newfound rebellious streak is somewhere between exhilarating and panic-inducing. “I just left.”

Nino says, urgent, “Dude, is that _ safe _\--?”

Adrien is asking himself the same question, over and over. Earlier, he was sure he would be fine with his father being angry, and he’d been sure he would be able to take a few blows, but now the situation is setting in, and he knows his father will take this opportunity to escalate. “I tore down a security camera too.”

Nino turns towards him now, and puts a hand on Adrien’s wrist, and pushes his glasses up his nose. “Dude. Look at me. Are you good?”

Adrien can only glance before he chickens out, unable to make full eye contact. He stares down at the street, watching people’s feet go by. “He put a camera on my bedroom door. I had to get out,” he says. “I had to--”

"Sorry, are you Adrien Agreste?” someone asks. Adrien looks up to see--a tourist, probably, judging by the accent. 

"No,” he says. He smiles, picture-perfect, even though he’s about to scream. “Sorry, I just have one of those faces.”

Nino grabs his hand, and pulls him into the bakery--and then, when the tourist follows them up the steps, Nino waves to Tom behind the counter and pulls Adrien upstairs. 

Adrien’s been here before. He’s had to come here a couple times on similar occasions, on evenings when Plagg got tired of watching Adrien get chewed out by his dad and forced him to seek support. At some point, Nathalie’s going to start checking _ here _first, instead of with Chloe and Nino’s parents, but for now, Adrien feels safe here.

That’s why he lets Nino sit him down on the couch, interrupting Marinette and Alya (he doesn’t even have it in him to tease about how they’d kept him and Nino waiting, while apparently just playing Xbox up here for who knows how long). 

“Is everything alright?” he hears Alya ask. Marinette has put her controller down, rising to her knees in anticipation of something awful about to happen.

"Yeah,” he says. He feels far away. 

“Do you have your phone on you?” Marinette presses him. 

Adrien’s usually smart enough to leave his phone at home, because his father has a way of tracking where his phone is, but he’d brought it along this time and his heart skips over itself as he hands it to Marinette.

“Let’s leave it here and go shop,” Marinette says, and sets it on the coffee table. 

“Fuck yeah, red herring,” Alya says. She and Nino are still watching Adrien carefully. 

Adrien’s breaths are short. He thinks about his father finding the Dupain-Cheng bakery and ruining the last safe place Adrien has. “I should go back and apologize,” he says. “That camera probably cost a lot of money.”

“Adrien,” Nino says. He has a way of grounding Adrien, pulling him back to earth. “What can we do?”

Adrien blinks at him, at Alya and Marinette. All three of them look poised to fight, or to hug him, or to make a human wall so that Nathalie or the Gorilla can’t grab him and take him back home. His vision starts to get watery. He _ hates _that they always have to be worried about him, that he can’t just talk his father into treating him better, that he had to do something stupid like break his father’s property and ruin the tenuous agreement they’ve reached.

“Let’s go shop,” he says. He takes his phone back from the coffee table, and puts it in his sweatshirt pocket. “If it takes longer than an hour to catch me, I’ll buy you all ice cream.”

“Adrien, I don’t--” Marinette glances from Alya to Nino, like all of them have some kind of understanding that Adrien isn’t a part of. “_ We _don’t want you to be in danger. You don’t need to provoke him.”

“It’s fine,” Adrien says. He rolls back his shoulders, fixing his posture. “Let’s just do it.”

It’s the Gorilla that wades into the plaza and finds Adrien, an hour and a half later. Adrien and his friends are seated along the edge of a fountain, enjoying their ice cream with their various bags strewn about their feet. 

Marinette spots the Gorilla first, and makes a warning noise, and points, and Adrien glances over his shoulder to see his bodyguard’s massive shape fighting through the busy street.

“Take these,” Adrien says, and pushes his shopping bags at Nino. Alya wordlessly accepts his ice cream, and then Adrien gets up all alone and follows the Gorilla to the car.

The car ride is quiet. It always is. 

The Gorilla keeps glancing in the rearview mirror at Adrien, like he feels like he needs to say something, but he never does. 

The All Saints Holiday is coming up this week. Adrien is going to have two weeks off of school, and it wasn’t smart of him to make his father belligerent right before that happens.

It wasn’t smart. It _ isn’t _smart, present-tense, for Adrien to be standing in front of his father with a very polite, docile, meek smile on his face, like he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong. 

“I thought I told you _ no outings with friends _,” Gabriel says. 

“Oh, did you?” Adrien smiles, the expression frozen onto his face. If he keeps smiling, and his dad doesn’t know how freaked out he is, maybe Gabriel will feel like he doesn’t have any power at all. 

“Nathalie, thank you,” Gabriel says. Nathalie leaves the office, and the big door shuts, and Adrien suddenly remembers that he’s alone. It’s just him and the massive portrait of his mother and Gabriel. 

(Would his mother take Gabriel’s side, if she was here?)

“You deliberately disobeyed me,” Gabriel says, his voice deeper now. Angrier. “And you vandalized my property.”

Adrien’s fingers twitch. “You shouldn’t have put a camera on my door.”

“I’m your father,” Gabriel says. “I need to know where you are, so that I can keep you safe. You’re the only family I have.”

Adrien can list several cousins, siblings-in-law, uncles, and aunts that Gabriel has alienated over the years. This isn’t the time to bring them up.

"You need to be the best,” Gabriel says, “so that you’ll be able to succeed when you take over the business. You _ know _ that. It’s one thing to focus on your _ bac _studies, but skipping fencing, and Chinese, and leaving without permission, and deleting company social media accounts without permission is unacceptable.”

Adrien’s smile slips, and Gabriel looks like he’s already won. 

Gabriel says, “I gave you the chance to take care of yourself, and all you’ve done is act out like a sullen child, and neglect your responsibilities, and let your appearance go. This company is our family name, and someday you will take it on. Right now, you’re bringing nothing but embarrassment to us.”

“I’m not embarrassing _ anyone, _” Adrien insists, “and I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Your perspective of yourself is skewed. I know what’s best for you,” Gabriel says. 

The office feels very big. (Or maybe Adrien just feels very small.) Gabriel is barely taller than him, nowadays, and Adrien is definitely stronger, but Gabriel still holds a weird power over him that Adrien can’t break, no matter how hard he tries. 

Adrien is feeling a very familiar feeling. Sometimes, when he’s out fighting as Chat Noir, and things are looking bad, he elects to go all in. Like when an akuma attack, three months ago, had gotten him electrocuted a few times already, and he’d just decided to tackle the akumatized person into the Seine, hoping that the electricity mixed with water would neutralize both of them. Ladybug had caught them at the last minute, screaming at him about how he could have _ died _, but Adrien is still fairly sure that when she returned her Lucky Charm, he would have been brought back to life anyway. 

So right now, Adrien, with the philosophy that he’s going to get in trouble _ anyway _, says, “No you don’t.”

“Pardon?” Gabriel asks.

“You never have,” Adrien spits. “If you knew what’s best for me, you wouldn’t have made me starve myself, and you wouldn’t keep me in this fucking house while everyone else gets to have a _ childhood _\--”

“_ Adrien _.” 

“--and you wouldn’t write down everything about me like I’m some kind of shitty experiment, and you would tell me what happened to Mom!”

Adrien sees the hit coming from a mile away. He neatly spins out of the way, even though Fashion Week Adrien is telling him he needs to take the punch if he wants more evidence for his flash drive. A black eye would certainly be incriminating.

(_ let him hurt you let him spill blood no one will believe you unless you’re hurt bad enough _ says Fashion Week Adrien.)

“Don’t _ touch _me!” Adrien shouts. 

There’s nobody in earshot who will step in. Nathalie has never intervened, and the Gorilla is far away, near the front door. Adrien is scared, and exhausted, and more angry than he’s ever been in his entire life. 

“I’m calling Nadja,” he hisses at his dad. 

“Do it,” Gabriel challenges him. A lock of hair as fallen out of place, and he looks almost unhinged. “Go ahead.”

Adrien shrinks back against the wall. “What?”

“Do it,” Gabriel snarls again.

Adrien, shaky, digs his phone out of his pocket. He has no idea what’s going through his dad’s head, and he has no idea why his father would encourage Adrien’s exposee. Unless--

“Wait,” Adrien says, terrified. 

“No, _ call _her,” Gabriel says. He’s smiling, vindictive, triumphant.

Adrien dials the number, but he already knows what’s going to happen. Nadja’s secretary picks up, and Adrien, faux-cheerful, says, “Hi, this is Adrien Agreste?”

“Hi,” the secretary says calmly. “What can I help you with?”

“I’d like to take Nadja up on her offer to have me on her show.”

“Hmm,” the secretary says. “Sorry, your psychologist visited, worried about you. You’re not permitted to book yourself on the show for the moment.”

“Oh,” Adrien says, and stares at his father. 

Adrien doesn’t _ have _a psychologist. He’s been asking for a therapist since the last time he and his father had a Big Confrontation, but he’s never received one.

“Unless you have a note from him sent to our office...” The secretary sighs. “I apologize. I hope we’ll hear from you soon.”

"Okay,” Adrien says, feeling rather like the floor has opened up underneath him. The call ends. Gabriel just watches him, smug. More frantic, Adrien scrolls down his call history and finds Étienne from _ Voici _’s number.

“Yup,” Étienne says when he picks up.

“Hey, it’s Adrien,” Adrien says. “I never thanked you for the article you ran.”

“No worries, little man,” Étienne says, “but never ask me for that again. Your dad’s lawyers are scary.”

“What?” Adrien asks. His throat is closing up.

“I can’t run anything that doesn’t come from your PR team,” Étienne says. 

“It’s an emergency,” Adrien pleads, feeling stupid. 

“Sorry,” Étienne says. He doesn’t sound very sorry. He’s probably on a deadline and he probably doesn’t want to be talking to a whiny child who’s upset about not getting media attention when he wants it.

The call ends shortly after that. Gabriel still hasn’t moved, but when Adrien hangs up, Gabriel says, “How did it go?”

Adrien thinks of the flash drive hidden in his bookbag. He thinks about the flash drive that Tom Dupain-Cheng has at his house. He thinks about how his father is getting even closer now.

“I could call the police,” Adrien says, but his voice is shaky. Shaky enough that Gabriel takes Adrien’s phone out of his hands and calmly takes it out of its protective case and then smashes it into the hardwood floor, shattering the screen into a million pieces, and Adrien doesn’t even try to stop him.

(_ let him hit you let him break all of your belongings make sure he leaves bruises this time) _

Adrien tries to grasp at the edges of the anger he’d had earlier, the anger that’s rapidly slipping away from him. “Leave me and my stuff alone, or I’ll call the police.”

His father is too fast for him this time, backhanding him across the face, and Adrien feels his father’s diamond-encrusted wedding ring cut into his cheek. Adrien’s very familiar with that feeling, with the feeling of his head snapping to one side, so hard his neck will twinge for a few days. (He wonders if his mother would be angry that the ring she gave Gabriel was being used for this.)

“I was almost proud of you, before all this started,” Gabriel says, and yanks Adrien back upright, pinning him to the wall with an arm across his throat. 

Adrien has never hurt his father, but right now, all he wants is to shove him backwards, to start a real fight, to defend himself like he _ knows _ he can. Plagg could destroy him with a single touch. (Half of him is thrumming with _ you have nothing left to lose you’re so close just push him a little further and he’ll snap. _)

“If you stop this tantrum, I’ll let you return to school after the holiday,” Gabriel says. “Apologize now, and your life will be a lot easier.”

Adrien smiles, his best photoshoot smile. And then he spits in his dad’s face.


	2. Chapter 2

Gabriel, does, in fact, repay Adrien’s action with a solid punch to the face, like a reflex. It knocks Adrien’s head back, banging it into the wall, and Adrien almost smiles with vindication.  _ That’s _ going to be a black eye.

But then to Adrien’s surprise, Gabriel doesn’t continue. He stops, and stares, and wipes the spit from his face with a handkerchief.

Adrien’s heart rate is way too fast for this sudden pause. (It’s not just Fashion Week Adrien that wants his dad to hurt him, it’s _all _of him.) “What?” he demands.

Gabriel says, icy, “Why do you  _ want  _ this?”

“I don’t,” Adrien insists, robotic, because that’s what he’s supposed to say. 

“Why do you always push me to fight you?” Gabriel asks. 

It’s Adrien’s turn to stare. “What?”

“I do all this because I need you to be  _ safe _ ,” Gabriel says, “but it’s as if you don’t care.”

Adrien shifts uncomfortably. Gabriel’s arm is still heavy on his chest, keeping him against the wall. Gabriel is dangerously close to understanding  _ exactly  _ what’s going on with Adrien, but then he keeps talking, and Adrien doesn’t know whether to be relieved or not.

“Don’t you want your mother back?” Gabriel asks. 

This rubs Adrien the wrong way. It doesn’t even make  _ sense,  _ and the non-sequitur is just making him more frustrated. “Dad, obviously--I mean, if she was  _ alive _ she’d be here, and you would be nice again. But I’ve moved on, alright? She’s  _ gone _ .”

“She doesn’t have to be,” Gabriel insists. His hair is falling apart, even more strands shifting out of place as he shakes his head. Adrien wonders how long he’s been awake, for his hair to become so unkempt. “I’m trying to  _ save  _ her.”

“What are you talking about?” Adrien asks. A new kind of anxiety is rising in him, along with a dizzy, floaty feeling that might be from hitting his head too hard. 

“I love her enough to never give up on her,” Gabriel says. “Do you?”

“You don’t love  _ me  _ enough for that,” Adrien says. But Gabriel has already moved on.

“I need to make sure you’re successful, and safe, but I’m busy  _ providing  _ for us and saving your mother’s life.” Gabriel pushes on Adrien’s chest a little harder, making it difficult to breathe fully. “Do you understand?”

“She’s not...” Adrien tries. “Dad, she’s not--”

“You don’t know anything about the matter,” Gabriel says. “You’re a  _ child _ . How can you give up on her like that?”

Adrien has pictures with his mother, but the memories are fuzzy now. She’s more like a recurring good dream he has. It still hurts, to have her gone, but Adrien isn't thinking about her all the time anymore. 

“If you would just  _ behave _ , I would be able to dedicate more time to her.” 

Adrien wheezes, “Is that what she’d want?”

Gabriel tenses. Adrien’s struck the right nerve. “Pardon?”

“I don’t know  _ what  _ you think you’re doing to bring her back, but it hasn’t worked yet.” Adrien’ voice is breathy and hard to make out because of the pressure of his dad’s arm. “And you’re being a shitty parent to the one kid she had--”

“Adrien,” Gabriel says, a warning, “you don’t want to cross me like this.”

Adrien, not listening, looks for the words he knows will hurt the most. Somewhere, he still wants to be injured so badly he can’t move tomorrow (wants to be injured in a way that won’t be fixed with a purified akuma). 

Adrien says, “You’re fucking crazy if you think she’d love you after this.”

That does the trick.

It doesn’t take long after that. Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes before Adrien is being herded back to his bedroom.

His father pushes him inside and locks the bedroom door behind him. Adrien stumbles over the threshold a little bit, so he’s too slow to stick his foot in the door. 

Once he’s gotten some of his breath back, he staggers over to his computer, trying to access his email so he can tell Nino what’s going on. He can’t remember his password, and his fingers are clumsy on the keys, and the bright screen makes his head hurt.

The wifi is out. Actually, Gabriel must have purposefully done that before having a confrontation with Adrien. 

As Adrien slips to the floor to curl up on his side and feel sorry for himself, Plagg is emerging from Adrien’s pocket and he’s fuming. “Where are you hurt?” he demands. There’s black energy crackling around his tiny paws, like he’s just about to unleash a Cataclysm.

Being in the fetal position isn’t as comfortable as he’d thought; past that, Adrien’s head is too foggy for him to pinpoint where his worst injuries are. He’s reeling from the strange conversation he’d had with his father, and he doesn’t want to face the world yet.

“I don’t know,” Adrien says into the floor. 

“Get an ice pack,” Plagg tells him, and then pokes Adrien when he won’t get up. “I’ll find the painkillers.”

“I need to get out,” Adrien says. His lip feels puffy, like it’s split. Similarly, the skin around his left eye is swelling so much he can hardly see out of it.

“Duh. I’ll help as much as I can,” Plagg promises. 

Adrien pushes himself upright on a shaky arm. For once, he doesn’t argue. He crawls over to the mini-fridge and gets an ice pack to push against his face, and then slowly struggles to his feet. “Where’s my fencing bag?”

“Closet,” Plagg says. He flies a bottle of painkillers over, and Adrien takes three.

Then, they both hear the signal for an akuma attack go off, and Plagg growls. “Great timing.”

Adrien says, “Plagg, claws--”

"_Wait_ ,” Plagg says, eyebrows pinched. Well, if he had eyebrows--they would be pinched. “Kid, you can’t fight like this.”

Adrien, very slowly and painstakingly, dabs. 

“Fuck off,” Plagg says. 

“I’m not going to fight,” Adrien promises. A wave of dizziness sends him onto the sofa, halfway to the closet where he’d been headed. “I’ll just--call Ladybug and tell her that I’m not available.”

“Okay,” Plagg says, after a long moment in which he’d scanned Adrien for any hint of lying.

“Claws out,” Adrien mumbles, and gets to his feet.

As Chat Noir, the pain feels more familiar, almost bearable. He takes inventory, and decides that his nose isn’t broken, and neither are his ribs, and nothing is bleeding (much). He slides his staff so that the communicator is open, and he says, “My lady?”

He doesn’t sound like Chat Noir at all. 

“Chaton?” Ladybug’s voice asks. “Are you coming?”

“I--” Adrien’s head swims. “I can’t come. I’m sorry.”

“You want me to just do it by myself?” Ladybug asks. 

“I’m--sick,” Adrien says. It’s the same excuse he’d used during Fashion Week, when he couldn’t get away for more than ten minutes at a time, but this time his voice actually sounds like he’s telling the truth.

“Oh?” Ladybug now sounds worried, distracted. It’s either concern about Chat Noir, or concern about whatever the akuma attack is. She’s probably strategizing, now that he thinks about it. “Okay. Well...feel better, then. I’ll handle it on my own. You owe me.”

She’s gone, after that. Adrien detransforms and falls to his knees again, and then flat on the floor. 

He lies there for a very long time, ice pack against his eye, completely still. There are explosions outside, and they get closer and farther away, periodically, rocking the house sometimes. Slowly, as the painkillers set in, his head feels less-achy-more-fuzzy, and his breaths stop hurting. The explosions eventually stop.

Adrien sits up again half an hour later. 

"How are you feeling, kid?” Plagg asks, wary.

“Better,” Adrien says. “I need to pack.”

He shoves some shirts, sweaters, jeans and shoes into his fencing bag, and then his toothbrush and his retainer and his laptop charger and some knick-knacks from around the room. He has no idea if he’s going to come back here, and he’s overwhelmed by choice. Plagg drops in the bottle of painkillers, and Adrien puts the bag and his schoolbag by the bathroom door before doubling back to his desk and fishing out the extra flash drive.

He writes a short note, and puts the note and the drive into an envelope, and shoves that envelope into his backpack. Better safe than sorry.

“Dad probably has all the cameras on my windows and front door,” Adrien says, perching on his bed. 

Plagg grimaces. “Yeah, transformation might be out.”

Adrien’s about to open his mouth to ask how hard it would be to kick down his bedroom door when there’s a soft knock on aforementioned door, and it’s unlocked and just as Plagg zips out of sight in Adrien’s pocket and Adrien’s bracing for another lecture--the Gorilla sticks his head in.

The Gorilla points at Adrien, and then over his shoulder. 

“What?” Adrien asks. 

The Gorilla looks around the room, and sees the two bags by the bathroom door, and jerks his head in their direction. Dazed, Adrien goes over and slings the backpack over his shoulder, and grabs the fencing bag, and follows the Gorilla into the hall. 

“Stay behind me,” the Gorilla grunts. It’s the first words Adrien has heard him say,  _ ever _ .

“Are you sneaking me out?” Adrien asks, in awe. 

The Gorilla gives him a Look, like Adrien is a tiny, stupid child, but it’s somehow affectionate. He starts moving, and Adrien sticks as close as possible.

The two of them creep through the house, pausing at corners to avoid cameras, and the Gorilla leads Adrien down to the garage. Passing his father’s study, Adrien hears his father’s raised voice, agitated, and he freezes up before the Gorilla gently guides him past with an enormous hand on his back.

It isn’t until they reach one of the smaller staff cars and Adrien is buckled in that he takes a full breath again. It’s wheezy, and the Gorilla crouches down on the ground, eye-to-eye with where Adrien is sat in the passenger seat. 

“I should have gotten you out years ago,” he says in a low, solemn voice.

Adrien shakes his head, even though the back-and-forth motion makes nausea surge in his stomach. “No, you were just doing your job--I know I’m a pain, and I don’t blame you for not--”

“You’re my kid,” the Gorilla says. He looks upset. Adrien  _ still _ doesn’t know if the Gorilla doesn’t speak much French, or if he just chooses short sentences on purpose. Adrien doesn’t know how to ask,  _ do you mean you think of me as  _ your  _ kid or is that just shorthand for “person I am hired to protect?”  _ “You okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” Adrien says, “but I think I have a concussion.”

The Gorilla holds up a finger, and makes Adrien track it with his eyes, and then nods solemnly when Adrien is unable to do so. “Where will you be safe?”

“Can we make one stop before going to Marinette’s?” Adrien asks.

“Anywhere,” the Gorilla says. “Not a company car. No tracker.”

The Gorilla closes Adrien’s door, then opens the garage door before getting into the driver’s seat. 

They drive quietly through the evening traffic. Adrien is a little nauseous, and he keeps drifting off into half-sleep before waking up again at every stoplight. The Gorilla is quiet, like he usually is, but Adrien gets the feeling that he’s glancing over at Adrien almost three times more frequently than he normally does.

After about fifteen minutes, they roll to a stop in the front courtyard of the Bourgeois mansion, and Adrien shakily digs the envelope out of his backpack and opens his door and wobbles up the front steps.

He presses the doorbell, and sees the camera within get activated.

“Hello?” says a tired voice a moment later.

“It’s Adrien Agreste. May I speak with Chloe?”

A heavy sigh. “Just a moment.”

Adrien waits in silence, swaying slightly. He leans against the side of the front archway, only to startle upright when the door is unlocked and swings open rapidly.

“Darling!” Chloe exclaims, but stops herself halfway towards a hug when she gets a good look at him.

“Hi, Chloe,” Adrien says quietly.

“Adrikins,” Chloe asks, terrified, “what happened to your perfect face?”

Adrien can’t make eye contact. He’s kind of dizzy. “Please keep this here,” he says, and thrusts the envelope with the extra flash drive into her hands. “If I lose the case, I need you to go to Étienne Caron at  _ Voici  _ and give this to him. Okay?” 

“What’s going on? What case?” Chloe asks. She takes a hold of his arm, but Adrien winces as she gets one of his multiplying bruises in her grip, and she quickly lets go. “You’re freaking me out.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Please don’t look at what’s in there. You’ll know what I’m talking about soon. I trust you.”

“Who did that to you?” she presses, taking his face in her hand and looking at the bruising carefully. (As if she doesn’t already know.) 

“Don’t worry,” he says, and pulls out of her grip, “it’ll be okay soon. I’ll call you when I can.”

“Don’t take your phone with you,” Chloe says suddenly. “He’ll track it.”

“Don’t worry, he broke it,” Adrien says back. He has no idea if that’s reassuring or not, now that he says it out loud. “If he calls, you haven’t seen me. He’s going to check here first. Alright?”

“Please be safe.” Chloe gives him the most careful hug she’s ever given anyone. “I don’t know  _ who  _ I’ll use as a fake boyfriend if you’re gone.”

“That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me,” Adrien says flatly, and she kisses his cheek, and then she lets him go.

Adrien collapses back into the front seat of the car, rubbing lip gloss off of his face, and the Gorilla takes off before anyone from the Agreste estate can see them there.

He must fall asleep, because when he opens his good eye next, his face is squished into the car window and they’ve stopped moving. He hears the low rumble of voices outside, and blinks a few times and spots the Gorilla outside, talking to Marinette’s dad in the alley behind the bakery.

Adrien cracks the door open, and says a weak, “Hi.”

Tom turns and smiles, an overly reassuring smile, like he’s trying very hard to remain calm. “Hey, son. Are you up for one more trip before bed?”

“Not a hospital,” Adrien says. He’s fuzzy around the edges, like he could go back to sleep and never wake up. 

“Up for filing a police report?” Tom asks. 

Adrien shudders. The more he replays the conversation with his father in his head, the less he’s convinced that his father is the huge monster Nino always says he is. Gabriel is just sad. And angry. Surely, Adrien can sympathize with that. 

But some of the things his dad had said are still unsettling to him, and maybe they’ll give Gabriel mental health treatment in jail? Like, maybe if Gabriel is  _ forced  _ into therapy, it’ll finally work for him?

“Um,” Adrien says. 

Tom says, “Are you unsure because you’re tired, or because you don’t want to?”

Adrien tries, “Tired?”

Tom doesn’t look like he believes him.

“I don’t know,” Adrien says. “I guess I shouldn’t have pushed him.”

“You don’t deserve this,” Tom says, and gestures to all of Adrien, “no matter  _ what  _ you did.”

“Okay,” Adrien says (mostly because if Tom gets upset with him in  _ any  _ capacity, Adrien will start to cry). “Let’s do it, then. I guess.”

Tom smiles again, and now Adrien is even more aware that it’s largely a facade. (Adrien only agreed because he wants Tom to like him, and now Adrien’s not even sure he’s fully living up to expectations.) “Do you want me or Sabine to come?”

“You could come,” Adrien mumbles. He’s getting sleepy again. He doesn’t want to inconvenience Sabine, but Tom is already inconvenienced, and he’s the one who knows about the flash drive, anyway. “I don’t want to be a bother. I could go by myself.”

He hears a quiet, “ _ Christ _ ” from the Gorilla, and then Tom says, “Kiddo, you aren’t ever a bother. If you need me to come, I’ll be there.”

"Could you grab…” Adrien says, yawning.

“Of course.” Tom smiles one more time, but even as he turns, the smile drops and Adrien sees what he’s really feeling. It looks like anger, but Adrien is too tired to be sure. He keeps his hands free, just in case he needs to defend himself.

Another akuma attack starts up, right as they reach the police station, and Adrien has to leap out of the car to throw up in the parking lot because he’s so stressed about how Ladybug must be doing on her own today. 

But he isn’t able to focus on that for long. Inside the station, they ask Adrien a  _ lot  _ of questions. They keep prodding him for specific dates and numbers and timelines and they get annoyed with him when he’s too slow in answering. Adrien’s head is pounding, and that’s  _ before  _ they get a photographer to extensively catalogue his injuries, the flash intermittently blinding him. 

They interview the Gorilla separately, and then they plug in the flash drive and sort through it with him in the room, and Adrien watches the Gorilla and Tom flinch in unison as they hear the audio of the video that Adrien had put on there. Adrien’s head is too foggy for him to really process the audio, but he has the words committed to memory already anyway. 

After about two hours, it’s just Adrien and two very big, concerned men sandwiching him, and one police officer who is assigned to his case, in a claustrophobic little room. Adrien wonders if they question criminals in here. (Are they supposed to handle cases like his in such a cold and brisk manner?)

"You’re prepared to press charges?” the officer says. “I can’t guarantee that it’ll go well, but you are very well-prepared with your evidence, so I’m confident the case will be strong.”

Adrien nods. 

“We’re going to talk to ASE,” the officer says. “We’ll announce formal charges before the week is over. Do you have somewhere safe to stay?”

Before Adrien can even ask, Tom has said firmly, “You’re welcome at our house.”

“If I could stick around too,” the Gorilla mutters to Tom, “I can keep perimeter around the bakery.”

Adrien nods to the officer again. 

“Alright,” the officer says. “That’s all we need for today, but the lead on this case may call if she has more questions. Expect a call from ASE, as well.”

Adrien doesn’t force himself to focus after that, once he knows it’s over. He trusts Tom or the Gorilla to take care of that, because his headache is reaching peak levels and his nausea is only getting worse. 

They exit into cool night air. Tom sweeps him up into a big hug, and Adrien swallows down tears, and he feels the Gorilla pat his hair very carefully. 

“I’m proud of you,” Tom says. 

It’s what Adrien has always wanted to hear, but it feels weird and wrong to be said on the heels of betraying his father. Adrien ducks his head, and feels one of them put an arm around his shoulders, and he lets himself be led to the car.

Sabine gets one look at Adrien’s battered face before she tears off her apron and runs at him. She replaces Tom at Adrien’s side, and Tom and the Gorilla move deeper into the kitchens without them, probably to talk about Adrien without Adrien listening.

“Sweetheart,” Sabine says, and taps Adrien’s shoulder because he’s missed something she said.

“Sorry,” Adrien says, eyes downcast. “I’m--tired. What did you say?”

“I asked if things went alright at the police station,” Sabine says patiently. 

“Oh. Yeah, fine.” Adrien glances at the stairs, and Sabine takes the hint.

“Must be bedtime,” she says, and gives an exaggerated yawn. “Tom said you’re not feeling great. I’ll bring something for your stomach up to the guest room, if you want to get settled?”

Adrien nods. 

“Alright on the stairs?” she asks.

He nods again. The tiled floor looks enormous in front of him, and the stairs look so far away, but he can make it. While it takes him almost five minutes to get himself and his two bags up the stairs, he succeeds, and he’s sat down on the couch for a breather when Marinette comes down the stairs from her room.

Marinette freezes when she sees him. She looks almost as drained as he feels. “Hey Adrien.”

“Hi,” he says. “Sorry, I’m staying over.”

“Yeah--uh. It’s fine!” she squeaks. It’s not a surprised squeak--her father had probably already texted her everything that was going on. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I just needed a breather. Are you?”

“Busy day.” Marinette sticks out her tongue, miming her exhaustion, but she looks like she’s trying very hard to act casual. It’s different from her old Try-To-Be-Cool-In-Front-Of-Adrien Look, and Adrien suspects it’s because his face is so messed up right now. “Two akuma attacks today! NOT that I was--involved, but you know, uh--traffic! Can I take your bags?”

“I got it,” Adrien says, but when he tries to stand up with his backpack on, he lists to the left so badly that Marinette runs over to catch him.

“Mari?” he hears Alya from upstairs. “Is that Adrien?”

Marinette has a steady arm underneath Adrien’s elbow, and another around his waist, supporting him like he weighs nothing at all. “Yeah!” she shouts up to Alya. “Call Nino!”

She turns her head to talk to Adrien in a much quieter voice--she’s noticed that her shouting has made him flinch, lean away from her. “He’s been freaking out all afternoon,” she tells him. “You didn’t say anything after the Gorilla came and got you. We’ve all been worried.”

“Sorry,” Adrien says. He feels like he says “sorry” more than anything else. 

“What happened?” she asks, hesitant, like she isn’t sure she’s allowed to ask.

He winces, trying to find a comfortable standing position without scaring Marinette away. The hand she has on his waist is reassuring, and he doesn’t want her to move. “Um. My dad broke my phone. And uh--turned off the wifi? And I couldn’t get out of my room until, um, the Gorilla came and got me.”

Marinette doesn’t say anything. When he turns to look at her, their noses are very close to touching, and he sees that she’s on the verge of tears. “Mom said you went to the police, finally.”

“Yeah,” Adrien says. He’s not sure if he’s dizzy from how close they are, or because he’s been standing up too long. 

“That’s really good,” she says, soft and encouraging.

“If we lose the court case, he’ll kill me,” Adrien mumbles, but he’s not even scared of that. Maybe Plagg had a point when he said that Adrien’s self-destructive attitude was more than a little obvious. 

“We won’t lose,” Marinette says, with the fierceness of someone who’s wanted to destroy Gabriel Agreste for four years now. She watches Adrien’s face carefully, and relaxes when he manages a hint of a smile. “Come on, we’ll get you settled, and then Alya can let you FaceTime with Nino if you’re up for it.”

Adrien lets Marinette take his fencing bag, and she half-carries him to the guest room, where Sabine has turned the covers down in anticipation of his arrival. Marinette awkwardly removes her arm from around him, and helps him execute a controlled collapse onto the bed, fully splayed out with his shoes still on. His head swims, and he struggles to take his backpack off without sitting up.

“Adrien,” Marinette says, in the affectionate-exasperated way that Adrien usually only hears from Ladybug. 

“What,” he mumbles into the pillow, giving up and going limp. 

“Sit up,” she says. “I’ll go get Alya.”

“Ice pack?” he asks hopefully.

“If you sit up,” Marinette says. She leaves, and softly closes the door behind her, and Adrien falls asleep. He doesn’t need ice  _ that  _ badly.

When he’s woken up again, he sees Sabine out of the corner of his eye, holding up a can of lemonade and popping the lid with a hiss of carbonation. “Adrien,” she says gently, coaxing him from sleep. “This is for your stomach.”

Adrien mumbles, “I feel fine,” but he’s mostly incoherent. His head is pounding again, and he doesn’t know how late it is. When he looks around the darkened room, he sees Marinette and Alya in the doorway, the hallway light pouring into the room from behind them. Alya’s face is lit up by her phone, and Adrien assumes that Nino is on a FaceTime call with her right now.

“Try to drink some anyway,” Sabine says.

“That’s too much sugar,” Adrien says. “I already had ice cream today.”

“You had two bites of ice cream eight hours ago,” Alya snaps from the doorway. “Sit up and drink the lemonade before Nino freaks out and comes over here.”

Sabine helps Adrien take off his backpack and then sit up, and Marinette quietly comes forward to take off his shoes. 

“I’ll do it,” he hears Nino’s distorted voice threaten. “Do you want me to come over, Adrien? Sabine said I could stay the night.”

Adrien wants nothing more than to have Nino and Alya and Marinette put on a movie and let him fall asleep in the middle of all of them, Nino’s arm on his shoulders and Marinette’s knee pressed to his and Alya’s legs sprawled across all their laps. He wants them to stop treating him like he’s going to fall apart, and he wants them to make jokes and show him dumb videos and he wants things to go back to normal. He has no idea how to ask for someone to touch him in a positive, gentle, kind way again without sounding like a creep.

“No, it’s okay, I’m fine,” Adrien grinds out. He’s already imposing on Tom and Sabine and Marinette and Alya and even the Gorilla (oh  _ God  _ the Gorilla is going to lose his job). “Nino, has--has Nathalie called your parents?”

“Yeah,” Nino’s voice says. “She was even ruder than usual.”

“Bitch,” Alya mutters. Marinette snorts. 

Sabine, while her mouth is pressed into an unamused line, tilts her head like she agrees and she’s just not allowed to say so because she’s the adult here. 

Adrien doesn’t say,  _ Nathalie is just doing her job,  _ because he doesn’t want to fight, and he’s sure that if he says something, everyone will talk down to him like he doesn’t understand _ .  _

“Can someone tell Chloe I’m safe?” he asks.

“I got it,” says Alya.

He takes a sip of lemonade. He hasn’t eaten since the ice cream earlier, and the soda rests easy on his stomach, despite the itchy feeling he gets when he notices that Sabine’s scratched out the part on the label where the calorie count would be listed. “Thanks,” he says to Alya. “Sorry,” he also says to Sabine, because he feels like it’s necessary.

“Sweetheart, it’s fine,” Sabine says.

“I’ll get you that ice pack now,” Marinette says. “You were asleep when I brought it last time.”

When Adrien wakes up the next time, it’s morning, and his ice pack is melted, and the house is quiet, and he’s alone. It takes him a moment to adjust, and remember where he is, but then he remembers  _ everything  _ and he curls into himself under the covers, trying to catch his breath.

Things are hazy after that. Adrien knows there are a lot of things that he should be doing. He should call his school and tell them he’s sick. He should go check the news and see if his dad’s been arrested or if he’s still out there somewhere, looking for Adrien. He should find his backpack and take approximately eight painkillers to stop the pounding in his head.

Adrien keeps breathing heavy, and can’t find it in himself to get up. If he stays here, under the covers, maybe Paris will keep going without him and he can fade away.

Plagg, next to his right ear, says, “Kid.”

Adrien startles, and then groans as four different injuries protest. “What?”

“I’m reminding you you’re safe right now. Also, I’m hungry.”

Adrien’s stomach is rumbling, too. Maybe he can resume his eternal hibernation after he gets some breakfast.

“Did I really do all that yesterday?” Adrien asks.

“Yup. Only took you four years,” Plagg says. He’s been threatening to call the police himself for at least half that time, but Adrien refused to tell him his phone passcode. “You okay, kid?”

“Do you even know my real name?” Adrien asks, twisting to look at his kwami.

Plagg scoffs. “Don’t dodge my question.”

“Don’t dodge  _ mine _ ,” Adrien says.

The two of them stare at each other, willing the other to blink first. 

“I shouldn’t have pushed you to do this,” Plagg says, quiet. 

“I did this myself,” Adrien points out. 

“I encouraged you,” Plagg says. His eyes are now looking anywhere but at Adrien. “You’re just a kid. We should have just left without provoking him.”

Before Adrien can assure Plagg that this is what he wanted (and maybe it’s for the best that he doesn’t get to say this, because one day Plagg’s going to snap and tell Master Fu or something), a knock on the door sends Plagg out of sight, and Adrien falls back into his sleepy, protective position under the covers. 

Tom pokes his head in. “Awake?” 

Adrien grunts. 

“How’s your head?” Tom asks. 

Adrien grunts again, in a way that communicates the pain level he’s feeling. He pulls the comforter down from over his head, and blinks at Tom. “Has ASE called?”

“Yes. Alexei talked to them for a while,” Tom says. “They’re gonna try to push the case as soon as possible, so it’s finished before you turn eighteen.”

“Who the fuck is Alexei?” Adrien asks, irritable. 

He doesn’t even have time to panic and apologize for his language before Tom laughs in his face. “Your bodyguard.”

Adrien scrunches his face up, embarrassed. “Oh.”

“Can you eat, do you think?” Tom asks. “Marinette and her friends will be back for lunch soon.”

Adrien slowly sits up. His arms are wobbly, and he can still see fingerprint-shaped bruises scattered across them, and he’s woozy by the time he swings his feet out of bed and goes to stand up. “Do you mind if I get more ice?”

“Hey, slow down.” Tom enters the room, and comes over to help Adrien up. “I made some breakfast for you, out in the living room. I’ll run get you ice before I have to go back to work, alright?”

They make the slow hike to the living room. There are a few plates on the coffee table, with a couple croissants and an omelet and a cup of hot chocolate and some fruit and cheese, and Adrien kind of wants to cry. He hasn’t gotten a good cry in yet--he’s a bit overdue. 

He sits on the couch, and smells the warm food in front of him. “Thanks,” he says. His split lip feels just as puffy as it did yesterday, and he’s kind of lisping around it.

Tom leaves his side and hurries to the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with an ice pack wrapped in a hand towel. “Anything else you need, son?”

The breakfast is such a sweet gesture that Adrien doesn’t know how to politely ask for anything else (he needs to change clothes, and brush his teeth, and get a look at how bad the bruising is on his face, and he needs about fifteen painkillers now). 

Adrien takes the ice, and shoves it against his eye and cheek. “I’m okay,” he forces himself to say. Once Tom leaves, he can struggle back to the guest room by himself to take care of things. 

“Sabine and I are just downstairs. Yell if you need us.”

Adrien nods. His head spins. Tom is gone the next time he opens his eyes.

“Plagg,” he mumbles, “can you get the painkillers?”

“All the way in the other room? You should have asked the big guy,” Plagg whines, but he’s already flying away, snagging all the cheese from the breakfast spread on his way.

One task down. Adrien eats a croissant and a few bites of the omelet before lurching back to his feet to get changed. He takes a change of clothes and his toothbrush to the guest bathroom, and, after Plagg swoops in with the bottle of pills, he locks the door to prevent anyone from barging in and trying to help him (and so no one but him can get a better look at his bruises). 

The mirror is not a welcome sight. Adrien is pale, his hair is greasy, his black eye is still swollen and purple, he has a fat lip, and the scratch high on his cheekbone is crusted with blood. When he finally manages to take his shirt off, he finds dark bruising up his ribcage on one side. He wonders why nobody at the police station had even offered to help clean him up.

More disturbingly, he doesn’t even remember getting these bruises. Adrien had completely shut down at some point yesterday, after he’d pushed his father enough that he was sure he’d hurt Adrien just a little more. “Aw, it’s not even that bad,” he tries to joke to Plagg, and Plagg bites his ear. 

“He’s never going to touch you again,” Plagg snaps. 

“He might,” Adrien says, rubbing his ear. “That hurt.”

“He  _ won’t _ ,” Plagg insists. “I should’ve killed that motherfucker years ago.”

“ _ Plagg, _ ” Adrien says, horrified.

Plagg sticks out his tongue, uncaring. “I’ve killed before. Anyway, it’s just my opinion. Here’s another one: you stink. Take a shower.”

Adrien obeys, even though he has  _ many  _ questions about Plagg’s casual admission to murder. He wonders why he rebelled so much against his father’s strict discipline, if right now all he wants is for someone to tell him what to do. 

The hot water  _ does  _ make him feel a million times better. Plagg probably didn’t have to parent his previous Chats Noir, but Adrien is grateful nonetheless. After he shampoos and conditions his hair, he crouches down in the bottom of the shower and stares at the floor for upwards of half an hour, until Plagg asks, “Did you die in there? Breakfast is getting cold.”

Adrien shuts off the water, and finds a clean towel on the hook outside the shower (most likely placed there by Sabine yesterday). 

Once he’s brushed his teeth and he’s in a clean sweater and jeans and some fuzzy socks Marinette gave to him last Christmas, he’s beginning to feel like a human again. But now, he’s been moving around for much too long. His vision is starting to get sort of gooey and strange around him, the bathroom tiles warping as he stares at them. 

“Let’s go finish breakfast,” Plagg says, nudging him towards the door.

“Wait,” Adrien says, and squats down again, putting his head between his knees. “Just a second.”

“Make it to the couch,” Plagg insists, “then you won’t have to move again.”

Adrien straightens his legs, and his vision goes dark. He blinks again, and he’s in a heap on the bathroom floor, damp hair in his eyes and ribs aching.

“Oops,” he says. 

Plagg, who’s flitting back and forth, emitting a range of curses, cuts himself off to say, “Can you get up? I can hear people on the stairs.”

Adrien grits his teeth, and gets to his hands and knees. 

Plagg disappears somewhere (Adrien can’t even fathom where), as someone pauses in front of the bathroom door. “Adrien? Are you in there?”

It’s Nino. He must be here with Marinette and Alya for lunch.

“Yeah,” Adrien says.

“Your hot chocolate is still out here. Do you want us to reheat it? You can eat lunch with us.” Nino sounds like he’s trying very hard to be upbeat and unworried. It’s almost working, but Adrien knows him too well.

“Um. I can do it.” Adrien is still trying to get his vision to stop swimming. This is  _ definitely  _ the worst concussion his dad has given him. “Sorry.”

“Why are you apologizing?” Nino asks. “Everything okay in there?”

“Fine!” Adrien says. He slowly, agonizingly, sits back into a crouch, then uses the counter to drag himself to his feet. Studiously avoiding his reflection in the mirror, he unlocks the door and finds himself looking up at Nino.

“Hey,” Nino says, quiet. He’s looking Adrien over, as he’s seeing Adrien’s battered appearance for the first time in person. Maybe Alya hadn’t turned the camera on Adrien at all yesterday, in respect of his privacy. “Feeling okay?”

“Haven’t puked yet today,” Adrien says, and smiles, but Nino’s face twists into a frown. Maybe that wasn’t something to joke about right now.

“I’m gonna hug you,” Nino says, and sweeps forward. Adrien meets him halfway, letting his face fall into Nino’s shoulder and holding on as tight as he can. 

They stand there in silence--Nino won’t let go until he’s sure Adrien is ready (and Adrien knows Nino needs this just as much as he does). Adrien hears Marinette and Alya in the living room, with the TV on, and his heart rate finally begins to even out.

“Your sweater’s fucking  _ soft _ , dude,” Nino says.

Adrien huffs a laugh against Nino’s hoodie. “Uh, it’s cashmere.”

“Uh, it’s  _ cashmere _ ,” Nino mocks. “Fucking pretentious ass.”

Adrien laughs again, harder this time. “Shut up!”

Nino finally pulls back, and gets another look at Adrien’s face. “Let’s eat. Okay?”

"Sure,” Adrien says, and lets Nino pull him out to the living room.

“Hey!” Alya exclaims as they enter the room. To her credit, her smile doesn’t falter a bit as Adrien comes into view. “We missed you at school today!”

Adrien doesn’t know if there’s much to  _ miss,  _ because he doesn’t really say or do much that’s very interesting at school. It’s sweet of her to say it anyway.

“You’re excused from the science project,” Marinette says, and heaves a sigh. “Lucky.”

Adrien actually wouldn’t have minded doing the project. “I’ll do yours.”

Marinette blushes. “I won’t let you. But thanks.”

Sabine crests the stairs with a platter of sandwiches just as Nino’s pushing Adrien back towards the couch. “Good morning, sweetheart,” she says warmly to Adrien. “Eat what you can, alright?”

Adrien nods, overwhelmed. Nino shoves him onto the couch, and he’s soon sandwiched between Nino and Marinette. Alya, on the other side of Nino, throws an arm over Nino’s shoulders and rests a hand on the back of Adrien’s neck.

“Thanks for lunch!” Alya says. 

“Anytime.” Sabine points around to them, and asks, “Anything to drink?”

“Um, water would be good. I can help,” Adrien offers, lurching forward, but Marinette sticks an arm out to keep him buckled down.

“Absolutely not,” Sabine says, and smiles kindly. “Marinette, come with me and we’ll get some sodas.”

Marinette gives Nino a look, a Don’t-Let-Adrien-Get-Up look, then gets up and primly follows her mother downstairs.

Alya and Nino carry the brunt of the conversation until Marinette comes back, and after that even Marinette talks more than Adrien. Adrien just zones out, and eats a sandwich, and drinks his water, and stares at the TV, which is showing a news broadcast. It’s a slow news day, and nothing keeps his attention for long.

He’s halfway asleep when he hears a booming, angry voice outside say, “ _ Come out, come out wherever you are. _ ” At the same time, the commercial on the TV screen about teeth-whitening kits is interrupted with the emergency warning for an akuma attack.

“Aw man,” Nino and Alya say in unison.

Marinette is out of her seat already, frantic, waving her hands vaguely as she runs across the room. “You guys help Adrien, I’ll go help my parents, uh--close the bakery.” And then she’s leaping down the stairs at an unsafe speed, out of sight. Adrien’s right side feels cold and empty with her gone.

A gigantic footstep rattles the floor. It sounds like it’s within a few blocks of them. 

“It sounds huge,” Alya says, tilting her head to see out the window, as Nino helps Adrien to his feet. “Where do we go?”

“ _ Je suis Cache-Cache _ ,” rumbles the akumatized person outside, in a simple introduction. “And I know  _ just  _ who I’m looking for.”

“‘Hide-and-Seek’?” Nino asks, and wrinkles his nose in thought. 

Though it may just be paranoia, Adrien makes the sickening decision that it’s  _ him _ the akuma victim is looking for. It’s either Nathalie or Gabriel himself, and they aren’t going to stop until they find him.

“They’re looking for me,” Adrien informs his friends, his voice hollow. 

“It could be anyone,” Alya tries to rationalize. “Like, maybe a mom lost her kid?”

“ _ Adrien, where are you?”  _ Cache-Cache asks. 

“Well then,” Alya says, suitably corrected. “Let’s hide.”


	3. Chapter 3

His friends react like they’ve rehearsed this Protect Adrien scenario a million times. Adrien is pulled to his feet by Nino, and he’s herded towards the guest room, and pushed into the bathroom. It all goes too fast for him to protest, or dig in his heels, and when he tries to open the bathroom door, someone holds the knob in place on the other side. “We’ll keep you safe in here,” Nino promises, shouting to be heard over the rumble of huge footsteps outside.

“Just stay put,” Alya says. “Ladybug and Chat Noir will take care of it.”

There’s no way to argue with that. So Adrien ignores the feeling of walls closing in on him, and quietly locks the door, pulls the curtain over the shower, and opens the small window high on the wall.

“Plagg,” Adrien hisses, as he boosts himself up and shoves his shoulders through the tight window frame, “claws out.”

Adrien is _ not _in a good mental place. And that’s before he sees that it’s his dad who’s been akumatized; he’s greeted by three stories of Gabriel Agreste with a tacky, brightly-colored outfit mimicking an old private investigator’s getup. 

Ladybug beats Adrien there. She’s swinging around Cache-Cache (his _ father _ ), trying to get close enough to see what item could be the akumatized one, but there’s a catch--everything that Cache-Cache grabs onto, once he’s determined that it isn’t Adrien, vanishes into thin air. Ladybug’s dancing around Cache-Cache’s hands ( _ Gabriel’s hands) _, staying just out of reach, but something’s off. She’s unbalanced, distraught. She’s not going to be able to distract him for much longer before getting caught, if she doesn’t calm down.

Adrien makes his entrance, before his lady can get disappeared. “_ Looks _like quite the predicament,” he shouts to Ladybug.

She shoots him a downright murderous look, and, _ alright _, maybe that wasn’t his best joke of all time. Adrien’s shaky and nauseous, and he’s barely keeping hold of his staff as he hurries towards the fight.

“Sorry you didn’t _ find _that too amusing?” Adrien tries again. He's really not on his A-game today. What are good detective puns?

“You’re next,” Ladybug growls, before yo-yoing to the top of a building to get a better vantage point for her next attack.

“_ Where’s my son, _” Cache-Cache roars, and sweeps a hand through half a block of buildings. All of them vanish, leaving no trace of stone or mortar or anybody who might have been inside. If Adrien had been in one of the top floors of those buildings, would his father have left him present, let him plummet to his death?

“It’s weird,” Ladybug says, panting as she swings by again, as both of them hurry to ward Cache-Cache off from more high-traffic streets. “Aren’t akumas usually trying to get _ us _?”

“I don’t know,” Adrien says. He can’t think straight right now.

She’s gone again before he can comprehend it, using part of a fallen street lamp as a club and swinging it at Cache-Cache’s torso. Cache-Cache smacks at it with his free hand, and the post disappears as soon as it touches his skin, and Ladybug shouts in frustration.

“I can’t get to the corrupted item,” Ladybug grunts the next time they’re in earshot of each other. 

“It’s his glasses,” Adrien says.

“Well, _ yeah _,” Ladybug says. The lenses of Gabriel’s glasses are now larger than her torso, and it’ll be quite an experience getting them off of Gabriel’s face. “Kitty, are you still sick?”

She’s asking because he’s barely contributing anything at all, and she’s picking up the slack for the millionth attack in a row. “It’s fine!” Adrien yells, as she swings further away. “This will be fast!”

Cache-Cache kicks cars out of his way, slogging through the street and slowing as he nears the bakery. “Are you _ here _?” he snarls, with the triumph of someone who has tracked and recorded Adrien’s phone location for years, and who finally gets to act on it. Cache-Cache rears back a fist, and plunges it deep into the second story of the bakery, shattering all the front windows.

Adrien’s vision tunnels. He digs deep for any sort of strength he has left, and vaults off of a roof and slams into the side of Cache-Cache’s head. He sees Ladybug swing up, prepping for a similar move, but he ignores her for the moment.

The bakery disappears, because Adrien isn’t in there right now.

Cache-Cache’s free hand sweeps up, going to disappear Adrien-- 

(_Adrien hesitates, thinking maybe it’ll be funny if he lets his father disappear the one person in the city he’s looking for_

_He hesitates, seeing a hand that’s struck him so many times and is about to do so again_) 

\--but then Adrien screams, “_ Cataclysm! _” and punches into the frame of Cache-Cache’s glasses.

They shatter, and Cache-Cache reels sideways as the Cataclysm’s impact pushes him off-balance, sending him toppling. Adrien sees streetlamps and sidewalk coming to greet the other side of his dad’s enormous head, but he doesn’t have any energy to move off of the shoulder he’s perched on. 

“Chaton!” Ladybug shouts, and swings by, catching him by the waist and pulling him to safety a few meters away. Adrien, in a very charismatic and heroic way, doubles over and vomits his guts onto the sidewalk. 

Thankfully, Ladybug is busy purifying the moth as it flutters out of the shattered glasses. By the time she turns back to worry about him, Adrien has escaped, and is high-tailing it across the street. 

He doesn’t look back, just focusing on his relief that the bakery reappears, fully intact, in front of him (and his relief that Ladybug hadn’t commented on the fact that _ Chat Noir _ has the same split lip as _ Adrien) _.

Adrien’s staff gets him halfway to the bathroom, and he frantically scrambles the rest of the way up, the only thing keeping him moving being the pure fear that his un-akumatized dad would somehow recognize him in his Chat Noir costume. He has no idea how he gets to the bathroom window again, but he manages to squeeze inside and land on his feet.

Alya is pounding on the door as he shuts the window and de-transforms. “Adrien?” she shouts. “Okay in there?”

Adrien’s knees give out, and he hits the wall of the shower hard with his shoulder on the way down. That had been a _ little _too much excitement for today. His hands are tingling, burning with the feeling of almost--

If he’d been just a few inches off with his Cataclysm--

“Adrien!” Nino calls. The doorknob keeps jiggling. “Ladybug and Chat Noir got it covered. Okay? Open the door.”

Plagg swoops around in front of Adrien’s face, so fast Adrien starts to feel nauseous again. “Kid, get up one more time.”

“I can’t.” Adrien’s voice is nothing more than a high-pitched whine. His hands hurt, even though Ladybug had swept away any remnant of damage Adrien’s Cataclysm could have done. 

(He could have _ killed _\--)

“I’m getting Tom,” he hears Nino mutter to Alya. 

“Get up,” Plagg tells him, insistent. “Something’s about to happen, I can feel it.”

Adrien scoffs, hopefully conveying the question, _ something worse than _that? 

Plagg keeps staring, deadly serious. “You beat him way too easily,” Plagg says.

Not a bad point. Adrien gets to his hands and knees and crawls to the door, where he uses the doorknob to pull himself up and finally unlocks it, and swings it open. Alya stops her fist halfway to pounding on the door again, her hand hanging uselessly in the air. 

“Thank fuck,” she says, sagging in relief, and pulls him into a hug that he can’t find it in himself to reciprocate. 

On the television in the living room, Adrien hears, “Live on the scene after today’s akuma attack, the reclusive Gabriel Agreste has agreed to speak briefly about his akumatization today.”

Alya, having heard the same thing, curses again, and helps Adrien along as she hurries out to the living room again. Adrien is sure that he could have made it to the living room by himself, with the new icy fear filling his veins, but Alya has latched onto him anyway. 

As akuma attacks happened more and more over the years, post-akumatization interviews are almost normal (why didn’t Adrien think of that before?). It’s an easy way to fill air time, and it’s a quick way to explain why, for example, all of downtown Paris was filled with a creeping, silent mass of bubblegum for an hour, once. ‘Sorry about all your missed flights,’ the first post-akumatization interview had been about, ‘I just can’t f--king deal with people chewing gum with their mouth open.’

Gabriel is on the screen, looking haggard from his time spent akumatized. He’s crying, Adrien thinks, but it’s hard to tell (it’s hard to tell if they’re genuine tears). “Anyone can be akumatized,” he’s saying, “but I am sorry for any adverse effect my actions have had today. As is probably obvious, I’m looking for my son Adrien.” 

A picture of Adrien pops up on the screen, as if everyone doesn’t already know what he looks like. 

Alya clenches her fists. Adrien sinks onto the couch, eyes helplessly glued to the screen. Nino finally reaches the top of the stairs with Tom, and Sabine in tow, but the three of them stop dead at seeing what’s going on. 

“Is he missing?” asks a reporter. 

Gabriel nods, solemn. “I fear he isn’t in his right mind. He’s been unstable the last few weeks, and reckless, and I worry about what’s happened to him.”

“It’s no wonder you were akumatized,” the reporters murmurs, sympathetic. 

“I cannot report him as officially missing yet,” Gabriel says, almost ignoring the reporter’s comment entirely, “but if you see him, please contact the police.”

Adrien is going to fucking pass out right here on the couch. 

“Adrien, if you’re watching this,” Gabriel says, and looks into the camera, right at Adrien, “please come home.”

The camera turns to Ladybug, who’s still standing there, probably unable to escape before the news broadcast started up. When the microphone gets shoved in her face, she looks _ angry _, nothing like the polite public face she usually puts on. 

“No comment,” she says, and brushes the microphone aside.

“Do you have some kind of grudge against Adrien Agreste?” the reporter asks, interested, pushing the mic back at her.

“Against _ Adrien? _” Ladybug asks, like it’s a joke. She side-eyes Gabriel.

Next to Adrien, Alya whispers, “Skinny legend.” The tonal dissonance of it all is almost enough to make Adrien stop spiraling.

“Why are you against him coming home?” the reporter presses.

“I said _ no comment _,” Ladybug says. She’s getting defensive, now, and the reporter can sense that (they don’t want to make an enemy of her). That’s why the reporter says nothing else before Ladybug yo-yos away.

Gabriel is being treated by paramedics, likely for shock. There’s nothing else for the news broadcast to focus on, and the wrap-up before commercial goes right over Adrien’s head as he zeros in on the “_ Breaking: Fashion Mogul Gabriel Agreste Pleads for Son’s Safe Return” _ script rolling across the bottom of the screen.

Everyone around him erupts into chatter, all trying to console him and reassure him, someone is rubbing a hand up and down his back like that’ll calm him down. It isn’t calming him down, it feels like they’re rubbing sandpaper across his skin instead. His stomach is churning and his father is _ on the street outside as they speak _ and he’s so, so tired. If he could just get a breath in, he could _ tell _everyone that he needs to be alone right now, but he’s choking.

Adrien abruptly hauls himself to his feet. He’s off-balance, and he knocks his knee against the coffee table and trips, almost landing flat on his face before finding his feet again.

At that moment, Marinette reaches the top of the stairs, and he whirls to make eye contact with her. She must have been making sure everything was alright downstairs after the attack--but that means she’s the only one who hadn’t seen what his father has just done. Something about his facial expression must tell her that he desperately needs help right now, because she breaks past her parents and darts forward and puts herself between Adrien and everyone else without question.

“Stop,” she snaps at everyone.

“He’s panicking,” someone unhelpfully points out. 

Adrien reaches out and grabs onto the back of Marinette’s oversized sweatshirt, because he needs something to hold onto. He’s not even seeing straight, and the adrenaline rush he’d had while fighting Cache-Cache isn’t fading--it’s ramping up and he doesn’t know how long he can handle it. At the rate it's beating right now, maybe his heart will explode and he won’t have to do anything.

Tom moves towards them, but Adrien shrinks away, pulling Marinette towards him like a human shield. Marinette gracefully moves backwards while chastising, “_ Dad _.”

“What? He needs help!”

“I’ll take care of it,” Marinette says. This is the harshest that she’s ever been with her father, Adrien is pretty sure (and it’s all Adrien’s fucking fault). “Everyone just--stop. Mom, please call into school for me. We’ll talk to you all in a couple hours. Don’t check in.”

She turns, breaking Adrien’s hold on her hoodie, and pulls him into the same position they’d been in yesterday--one arm around Adrien’s waist, the other supporting his elbow, and he leans against her immediately, head bowed. There’s no time to even feel embarrassed for being like this in front of the majority of people he trusts in the entire world, because she’s whisking him into the guest room and shutting the door behind them. 

Once inside, Adrien can’t even make it to the bed. His knees, which have been struggling to keep him up every time he’s stood up since yesterday afternoon, buckle as soon as the door is closed. Marinette, again, has to help him fall in a way that doesn’t injure him, and the two of them end up on the floor in a heap.

“Go ahead,” Marinette says, giving him express permission to lose his shit.

Adrien’s breathing, already choppy, gets even worse. He digs his hands deep into his hair and _ yanks _. “Thanks,” he manages.

“Of course,” she says. She reaches out halfway, almost to pull his hands out of his hair, but she hesitates at the last minute, and he’s grateful. 

“I’m--he’s not supposed to _ do that--” _

“I saw them interview him,” Marinette says, and Adrien is saved from explaining the situation. “The piece-of-shit police in this city couldn’t do their _ jobs _fast enough, but we’ll keep you safe here. Do you understand?”

“What if--” Adrien tries to breathe in again, and finds that he can’t. “What if--if he--”

“Adrien,” she says. She sounds a little freaked out (though she’s doing extremely well--Plagg is the only one who’s seen Adrien like this, besides maybe Nino once). “Breathe.”

“He’s gonna _ kill _me,” Adrien keens.

“He won’t,” Marinette insists. “You’re safe.”

“He’s gonna beat me in court and he’s going to--” Adrien laughs, hysterical, “he’s gonna, I don’t-know, he’s gonna sacrifice me and use my fucking essence to resurrect my _ mom _\--”

“Um,” Marinette says, trying to bring him back to earth, “sorry?”

Adrien tries to laugh again, but the sound is unnatural and it hurts his chest and it sounds like a pitiful cry for help. “He wants her back--so _ bad _ and I have no idea what he’s doing but he needs _ me _out of the way--”

Marinette is probably severely tempted to dive deeper into the bullshit that Adrien is saying, but she stays impressively focused. “Is this something we actually need to worry about, or are you just freaking out?”

Adrien _ doesn’t know. _ His father hadn’t sounded exactly like he was in his right mind, earlier, but if Gabriel is still chasing after ways to save his wife after this long, Adrien has no _ idea _ what he’d do. (Adrien might be about to pass out, he might be delirious right now, but he wants Marinette to _ know _what’s going on.)

“I won’t let him touch you,” Marinette says when Adrien doesn’t answer, like she alone is going to stand between Adrien and his dad. “Nobody here will let him anywhere near you.”

He looks up at her. She looks like she means it. She’s also the person with her back against the guest room door, keeping anyone from barging in on them, and she’s also strong enough to practically carry Adrien without even breaking a sweat. 

“I’ll slam-dunk him into a coffin myself, if I have to,” Marinette says, trying to get a genuine, good laugh out of him (one that doesn’t sound like he’s two breaths away from a psychotic break). She’s fierce, and intimidating, and she could probably actually _ do _it. 

Adrien does, in fact, laugh. He’s startled out of his hyperventilating, at least. But the laugh very quickly morphs into tears, and he has to hide his face in his hands as he descends into ugly sobbing. 

“Can I hug you?” Marinette asks, because there’s nothing else to say, and when he frantically nods, she pulls him into a hug. 

Adrien keeps his face hidden, because _ nobody _wants to see crying, blotchy-faced Pathetic Adrien, but the embrace is calming. It almost muffles the sounds of people talking about him in worried voices out in the living room. 

“My parents are so overbearing,” Marinette says. Adrien can’t tell if she’s consciously rocking him back and forth, but the motion is soothing and Adrien doesn’t want to draw attention to it and make her stop. “I was wondering how long it would be before you had enough.”

“Yeah, but they care and that’s-that’s really nice.” Adrien’s hands are getting extremely damp with his tears. He wonders how much he’d have to cry for his entire body to drain of salt and water and for him to turn into a mummy. 

He may be delirious from his adrenaline crash.

Marinette doesn’t answer that. She probably doesn’t know what to say. After a few minutes of more violent sobs tearing through Adrien, she tries to make him talk more by asking, “What are you thinking about right now?”

He doesn’t know how she would react to his musings about mummies, so he picks the second-worst option and jumps with both feet into a discussion about his emotions. “I wish nobody had ever heard of me,” Adrien says. His hands are wet with his tears, and all he can taste is salt, and it’s possible that Marinette can’t even understand him.

Marinette stiffens, almost imperceptibly. “Oh?”

Adrien’s vision is only getting spottier with each heaving sob that escapes him. He lets his hands fall from his face, and he wraps his arms around Marinette tightly to finally reciprocate her embrace (nobody else is going to want to hug him, especially after how shitty he was to everyone out in the living room. Adrien’s going to have to wait until it’s safe for him to see Chloe before he can get another fucking hug). “There’s gonna be--a whole _ news cycle _ about me missing, and it’s bullshit! Like, eighty--eighty-thousand people go missing every day and nobody makes a big deal but because my _ dad _is famous everyone has to hear about me?”

“Huh,” Marinette says. 

“All these people don’t even know who I am and they’re gonna be sad but--” Adrien almost convulses as he searches for air that isn’t there; his vision fully shorts out for a second. “--I _ want _to disappear. I wish I could just vanish and it wouldn’t even be a big deal.”

Marinette stops rocking them back and forth. The stillness is jarring. “Do you have a plan?” she asks, quiet.

“Oh--_ no _, nothing like that.”

“You can tell me if you do. Or tell...somebody. I mean,” she’s flushing--he can feel her face get warmer against the side of his head. “It doesn’t have to be me.”

“Got it,” Adrien says. He’s crested the top of his pity party now, and his sobs are beginning to subside into hiccupy, shaky breathing. 

They lapse into silence. The conversation out in the living room seems to have petered out, too.

“Are you okay with me hugging you this long?” Marinette asks, a few minutes later. “Fourteen-year-old me would be having a stroke right now.”

“Same.” From somewhere deep inside of him, a giggle bubbles out. “Have I lost some of my charm now that I’ve cried on you a few times?”

“No,” Marinette says firmly. Adrien has the strange impulse to believe her. “Not at all.”

They fall quiet again. Marinette starts humming, and Adrien turns his face towards her neck where he feels more comforted. Neither of them voice the fact that this doesn’t feel like a friend-hug anymore. 

“Can I tell you something fucked up?” Adrien asks.

“Sure,” Marinette says. “I’ll tell _ you _something too, so we’re even.”

Adrien sniffles, and the brief fond smile on his face makes a world of difference even after it fades, even after he figures out how to word his next sentence. Maybe it’s easier for him to say this because she isn’t looking at him, but he says, “I _ wanted _my dad to beat me up yesterday.”

She takes a sharp breath in, but lets him keep talking unchallenged. 

“I had to say really mean things to him to get him to do it, and now he might go to jail and it’s _my fault _and I didn’t even really want to go to the police but now it’s _too late_. He just wants to be happy and I ruined that_._”

“He ruined that the first time he hurt you,” Marinette reminds him. She ends their hug and looks up at him, not recoiling an inch from his blotchy, hideous face. “_ He _ made that choice.”

Adrien can’t make eye contact with her, no matter how hard she tries to get him to do it. “Hmm. What’s your fucked up thing you were gonna say.”

“I was gonna say I used to put hair from my hairbrush in my sandwiches because Chloe would steal them at lunch time,” Marinette says without a beat of hesitation, “but I feel stupid about it now.”

_ That _ gets him to look her in the eye. “Um?” Adrien asks. “You. _ What _?”

“Like I said,” Marinette says, and smiles casually, in gentle self-deprecation, “nothing on the same level as your thing.”

“Marinette,” Adrien starts, morbidly fascinated, “that’s.”

“Super normal, if you think about it,” Marinette says. She breaks at the sight of his horrified face, snickering. “Uh, that wasn’t as long ago as you would hope.”

“That’s terrifying,” Adrien says.

Marinette smiles again, because she’s successfully distracted him from panicking himself to an early grave. “It worked, though.”

Now that he’s been broken out of his descent into full desolation, the conversation is much lighter. Eventually, Adrien is yawning, and leans into Marinette, and neither of them even attempt to move to the bed before the two of them fall asleep. As the shadows creep up the walls and the streetlights turn on outside, he’s almost able to forget why he’s barricaded in this room with Marinette in the first place.

The next day, when his friends are back from school for an hour for lunch, they barge into the room and pile onto the bed around Adrien, like nothing’s happened. He’s feeling much more stable after a full night’s sleep (he’d woken up that morning with Marinette’s head on his shoulder, both of them sitting up against the door, his head resting on top of hers and the worst crick in his neck he’d ever had. He felt safer than he had in weeks, and that feeling only increased when neither Tom nor Sabine lectured him for his disrespectful behavior yesterday). 

“Dude, so did your dad not find you yesterday?” is the first thing Nino asks. 

This is not the line of questioning that Adrien was expecting from him. “What?” he asks.

“I was watching the footage,” Nino says. Alya elbows him. “_ Alya _was watching the footage, and she made a good point.”

“He disappeared the whole bakery. But you were here, and wasn’t he looking for you?” Alya asks.

Adrien glances to Marinette. Marinette, sensing that the interrogation is making him anxious somehow, still chooses not to help (maybe she’s curious, too). “Don’t look at me,” she says. 

“I assumed he would be able to see you, and everything else would disappear _ around _you,” Alya says. “But I didn’t see you on the film.”

“That’s weird,” Adrien says noncommittally. The symptoms of his concussion are much lessened at this point, so the nauseous feeling is probably fear. 

“That’s all you have to say?” Nino asks, disappointed.

“What do you want me to say?” Adrien asks. “Maybe my dad is just shitty at Hide-and-Seek. I mean, he never played it with me or anything.”

“Interesting,” Alya says. “My theory was more along the lines of, you escaped out the bathroom window and you got back in before you unlocked the door again, but I _ guess _yours makes more sense.”

“I’m concussed,” Adrien says, which neither directly confirms or denies her (largely correct) theory.

“You’re a badass, though,” Nino says.

Adrien flutters his eyelashes. “You think so?” 

Out in the living room, behind the cheerful chatter of his friends, he hears serious-sounding adult voices. “Is something happening?” he asks.

“Um,” his friends all say, the embodiment of deer stuck in headlights as they furtively glance at each other. He realizes, with a sinking feeling, that they’re acting as a diversion (he’d been _ right _to be surprised when they treated him so normally, even after he had a huge tantrum yesterday and acted so ungrateful for all the help they’d given him). 

“What’s the _ real _reason your dad couldn’t find you?” Alya asks, leaping in to distract him again. She jabs her phone in Adrien’s face, like a microphone. “What don’t you want the public to know?”

Adrien laughs, a half-nervous, half-annoyed sound, but he decides to play along (it’ll be easier in the long run to just let his friends think they’re good at acting casual). He takes a deep breath, like it’s taking a lot of courage to say something, and then he says, “You’re right. I have a big secret I’ve kept from my fans. A secret life, even. I protect this city, day and night. I’m sorry I’ve been lying to everyone for so long, but...I’ve been Ladybug this whole time.”

“This _ whole time _?” Alya asks, while Nino pretends to swoon. Adrien hasn’t gotten much reaction from Marinette (though she’s probably aware of the fact that Adrien is acting with thinly-veiled annoyance). “But how could you and her be in the same room at the same time?” 

“I’m her stunt double,” Adrien says. 

“She does her own stunts,” Marinette interrupts to say, vehement. 

“I’m the opposite of a stunt double,” Adrien corrects himself. “Like, I do everything _ but _ the stunts.”

“Yeah, your little rich boy bones are too fragile for real stunts,” Nino agrees. An extra beat of quiet passes, as Adrien’s friends gauge his reaction, but when Adrien snickers, the rest of them relax again. Adrien wonders how many times he has to pretend to be normal for his friends to stop treating him like a fucking expensive vase or something.

Alya snorts. “Like _ you’re _ qualified to say that, Nino, your parkour channel only has a hundred subscribers--”

“How dare you,” Nino says. “You _ know _that’s the thing I’m sensitive about.”

Adrien rolls his eyes. He doesn’t respond, because he’s gone back to trying to make out what the adults are saying about him in the living room. He hears, under the hum of Tom’s voice, the multicolored noise of a news broadcast. When still nobody has addressed what's obviously going on, and Alya and Nino haven’t stopped their somehow-staged argument, he says, “I know something’s up.”

Nino sighs, seeing that Adrien’s not going to cooperate with further diversionary tactics, the fight going out of him immediately. “We just didn’t want you to be stressed for longer than you had to be.”

This is among the least soothing things that Nino has ever said. 

“Okay?” Adrien says, incredulous. He remembers how he used to be able to go _ months _ before snapping with anger, but now he can barely go a few hours. Maybe the anger-management apple doesn’t fall far from the anger-management tree. (Now _ there’s _ a soothing thought.) “I can handle--whatever.”

“We know,” Alya says. “We know you _ think _that--”

Marinette elbows her. This is definitely a conversation they’ve had before, probably when they were at school and reading all the news articles about Adrien and they were all talking about him and planning how to keep him safe.

(As if Adrien is too stupid to keep himself safe ((_if he wanted to be safe he’d be at home right now, practicing fucking piano_)), as if Adrien doesn’t know that everyone thinks he exists just to be looked at and manipulated.)

Adrien throws the covers off and gets up on wobbly legs and calmly leaves the room before he can scream. Nino, Marinette, and Alya all reach out to pull him back, and at least two of the three trail after him (Adrien speeds up so they can’t run around and shut the door in his face), but he breaks free from the guest room and finds the Gorilla, Tom, Sabine, and another woman Adrien’s never seen before standing in a semi-circle facing the television.

They startle and turn as Adrien tears out of the room on unsteady feet, in two-day old clothes and greasy hair and with frustration-hurt-anger painted on every inch of his face. 

“Where are you going?” Sabine asks. 

The scroll at the bottom of the TV screen says, _ Gabriel Agreste Wanted On Charges of Child Abuse and Neglect. _

“Oh my God,” Adrien says, and stops dead.

“It’s going to be okay,” the unknown woman tries to tell him, but Adrien’s hearing is whiting out. He has no idea what he was planning on doing before, and all he can do is stare at the TV screen. His father’s lawyer is doing some kind of press interview, cameras clicking and flashing around her, but her words are just a stream of sounds that Adrien can’t decipher right now.

“Adrien,” someone says right next to his ear, and he tenses, putting up a hand to protect his face, but it’s just Nino. “Come on, let’s sit down.”

He lets himself be guided to a couch, where his friends leave him (he thinks they go with Marinette’s parents into the other room, but he forgets to watch where they go). The woman crouches in front of him to be eye-level, and says, “Hey. I’m Therese, your case manager with ASE. I know this is probably really scary right now, but you’re going to be alright.”

“I’m not,” Adrien insists (he hasn’t even processed what she’s said, but he disagrees automatically). He looks over Therese’s shoulder, back at the screen, and there’s footage of some reporter standing in front of his home, and Adrien’s stomach turns over itself. “I’m...not--”

“You will,” she tells him. “I’ve spoken with some of your friends, and you have a lot of people in your corner. You’re not going through this alone.”

“What if--” Adrien takes a deep breath. He needs to shove down the horror-nausea-panic he’s feeling if he wants to show _ anybody _that he’s functioning. “If I lose, will I have to go back?”

“You turn eighteen soon,” Therese reminds him. “If it starts looking that way, and it probably _ won’t _, we can delay proceedings until you’re old enough to simply move out.”

“So why am I even doing this?” Adrien asks. His voice is thin, and scared, but he keeps talking anyway. “I’m--ruining his life for no reason, then.”

“It’s not for no reason, Adrien,” Therese says. She looks him over, probably examining the fading black eye and healing split lip. Or she’s just shocked that Adrien Agreste looks so disheveled and exhausted and yet he’s still dared to show his face in public (being in the presence of even one other person is “public”). “What he’s done is unacceptable.”

“I made him do it,” Adrien says.

“I’m sure that’s not true,” she says, already dismissing him. 

“It _ is _.” Adrien glances over his shoulder, trying to see where his friends have gone, but Therese interrupts him with a hand on his knee.

“I can’t stay for long, but I wanted you to know that you’re in safe hands,” she says. 

Adrien’s lungs are contracting and expanding, but he doesn’t feel like he’s been breathing at all. His dad has a _ warrant for his arrest, _ and he knows Adrien said something to the police, and apparently nobody knows where Gabriel is. Adrien wanted to go back to _ school _ this week. He wanted to be able to go _ outside _.

“Great,” Adrien says. He looks back at the TV, and sees Nathalie shielding her face from reporters, making her way from a car to the house with two police officers keeping the crowd back from her.

“I’ll see you later,” Therese says. 

Adrien moves his gaze back to her, and doesn’t have the energy to even change his facial expression. When he doesn’t say anything else, she stands, and leaves, and nobody comes back to take her spot. He hears them talking to her in hushed voices, as she fills them in on how insufferable Adrien is, but then that’s it. 

He sits on the couch and stares past the TV, and he tries to mentally shut down his organs one by one.

He doesn’t know how long it is before Sabine comes to nudge him. “Hey sweetie,” she says, perched on the couch next to where he’s rigidly sitting. “You up for eating something?”

“How long would it take for someone to know if their liver stopped working?” Adrien asks.

With the patience of someone who has successfully raised a child, Sabine says, “I don’t know, let’s look it up. Are you hungry?”

“I don’t think so,” Adrien says. 

“Want to try?” Sabine asks.

“Maybe later, but thank you for offering,” Adrien says, and he sounds so perfectly polite that he can’t stand it. His voice sounds he’s a robot pretending to be a person. It sounds like it isn’t even his. 

(He wants someone to earnestly ask how he’s doing so he has an excuse to break down sobbing on them again, and he wants to transform into Chat Noir and take a little trip up the Eiffel Tower, and he wants to time-travel back to before he left his fucking house.)

Sabine nods. He thinks she’s trying to give him space, because he’s not her kid and he’s had a few meltdowns when people got too close, but he wants her to hug him or to even squeeze his hand or kiss his forehead or something. Adrien wants--

(Adrien wants his mom.) 

He doesn’t let himself have any of it. He doesn’t get a _ chance _to, because the TV starts blaring the warning for an akuma attack and both he and Sabine jump about a foot in the air at the interruption.

“I’ll go close up downstairs,” she says, as heavy footsteps rattle the bakery for the second day in a row.

“_ I know you’re in there _,” says whatever’s outside.

Adrien bolts. He doesn’t have time to try and help Sabine or anyone else in the building--he’s going to have to trust that Ladybug will fix this. Adrien snatches his backpack off the floor as he goes and slams the bathroom door behind him and locks it and leans against it for as long as he can.

“If I have to hear the name Cache-Cache again I’m going to kill myself,” Adrien says, trying to catch his breath.

Plagg ignores this worrying comment and asks instead, “How the fuck does your dad keep getting akumatized--”

“He’s an angry man,” Adrien says, and laughs a high-pitched and unstable laugh. “Do you--do you need--”

Plagg has already digging cheese out of the backpack and is popping some into his mouth. “This cheese is gross,” he says, even as he eagerly devours it. “It’s been out of the fridge for like eight months.”

“Well, I don’t know what to--do about that, so,” Adrien says, “claws out.”

He’s out the window mere seconds before the akuma’s fist slams through the wall of the bakery again, and he sees the hulking shape of a creature that looks as if they’re made out of crackling, molten lava. Adrien vaults across a few buildings before approaching from a different angle, and shouts, “Hey, _ Agreste _ ! Are you looking for your _ son _again?”

The monster, slowly and achingly, turns to face him. The face is stretched into something horrifying, and one of its hands remains clenched in a fist, as if something is clutched there. With the non-clenched hand, it rips the roof off of the bakery entirely, sending globby bits of lava everywhere, without breaking eye contact with Adrien. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” it rumbles. But something about its shape, and tone, and movement of this monster has Adrien _ very _sure it’s his dad. 

This feels different, somehow. There’s no gimmick, and there’s no catchy name, and again, there’s no motivation to grab Adrien’s Miraculous.

Adrien says, “Second attack here in two days! That’s a bit tacky.”

An enormous lava-hand is swept in his direction, and he neatly backflips out of the way, landing solidly on his feet. The size of the creature is much too big for it to make quick attacks, but that doesn’t mean that the close brush with literal lava was very comfortable, either.

“Is this look going in your fall catalogue?” Adrien asks, because somebody’s always filming, and he’d already seen comments on the Ladyblog about the last attack, talking about how he fought like a piece of shit last time. (And Ladybug is running late, which means he’s going to have to make it a great show for everyone all by himself.)

Gabriel--because it _ is _Gabriel; Adrien can’t avoid that thought forever--slams a hand into the side of a building, and it begins to tip, and Adrien has to sprint and leap out of the way before he’s crushed. “You know where he is, don’t you?” Gabriel roars.

“No, I fucking hate that kid!” Adrien cackles. “Maybe not as much as _ you _do, but--”

He sees a hand coming down to crush him like a fly in a flyswatter, and he barely rolls out of the way in time. In the distance, sirens start up, and Adrien wonders when the last time was that _ any _emergency responders showed up to an akuma site. 

Gabriel’s attacks, while slow, are constant, and Adrien finds himself just barely evading them each time. They’ve cleared a half a block in all directions, and the fires are beginning to spread, and the haze is getting worse by the second. He needs a _ plan, _ but the cheese that would have given Plagg fire powers is in the charcoal and rubble that remains of the bakery, and Ladybug _ isn’t here _.

“I _ never _hated him,” Gabriel roars, and the next sweep of his arm singes Adrien’s side as he jumps over it, and tiny flames start to lick up his costume. 

“Well, you didn’t _ love _ him, either,” Adrien shouts back, frantically smothering the flames as he goes. He drops to the fire hydrant across the street, and slams his staff against it as hard as he can, and the resulting spray of water wards Gabriel off for the time being, hardening one part of his leg into rock as the water cools the lava there.

The sirens are getting closer, multicolored lights reflecting off of intact buildings further down the avenue. Adrien doesn’t want to watch his father kill a bunch of first responders, but he also doesn’t want to be doing this alone right now.

Gabriel staggers back from the fountain of water, hobbling on one leg that’s now completely stiff. The first fire engine slows to a stop about half a block back, and firefighters begin to pour out.

“Why’d you come here?” Adrien shouts, because it’s his last chance. “You’re going to get arrested.”

“I needed to find him, and I was told he’d be here,” Gabriel rumbles, and the lava almost seems to cool down a little bit (Adrien almost doesn’t hear the next thing he says, because he’s too busy spiraling about who the _ fuck _ could have told Gabriel where he was). “He’s my _ son. _ I needed to tell him--”

“Heads up!” Ladybug yells, and a jet of water blasts into Gabriel from behind, and Gabriel roars and turns to face them. In his surprise, Gabriel opens his closed right fist, and Adrien sees something fly out--that must be the akumatized item. 

“Ladybug!” he screams, and points, but she’s already swooping towards it and hefting what must be her lucky charm--an enormous hammer. Seems a _ little _on-the-nose, but maybe her Miraculous’s magic force is as tired of fighting Gabriel Agreste as Adrien is. She drops from a story up and slams the hammer down, and a peacock feather flies out--not a moth this time.

Gabriel’s lava form is mostly cooled rock by now, and he’s too slow to swing at Ladybug or Adrien again--and then Ladybug’s magic wipes all of it away, and it’s just Gabriel Agreste flat on his back on the pavement. His clothes are wrinkled, and his hair hasn’t been gelled back, and Adrien has a strange impulse to pull him inside so cameras can’t see him like this (he must be so embarrassed).

Ladybug has swung down the street--most likely to find a police officer or something, trusting that Chat Noir can take care of Gabriel. But as Chat Noir, there’s no reason for him to have sympathy for a man who’s wanted by the law, so Adrien runs into a side alley and de-transforms before sprinting back out to his father (Plagg tries to stop him, but Adrien isn’t listening anymore). 

“Adrien!” someone shouts from the bakery. “Get away from him!”

Gabriel turns his head sharply at the sound of Adrien’s name, and Adrien doesn’t even have time to consider giving his dad more space before his father’s arm has shot out and he’s grabbed hold of Adrien’s wrist. The painful grip is familiar in a way that the events of the last few days weren't. 

“You did this to me,” Gabriel says, calm, and pulls Adrien closer so that he’s in whispering range. 

Adrien is frozen still, balanced precariously in a crouch. 

“You’d rather destroy your family’s reputation than even _attempt_ to be a good son,” Gabriel states.

Ladybug is coming back now, a police car roaring along behind her. People are shouting all around them, and Adrien can’t hear any of it.

Adrien has nothing to say to his father. He doesn’t know why he came out here. Gabriel huffs, derisive, but he reaches up and yanks something from beneath his necktie, and shoves it into Adrien’s hand. “This is yours. You can save her, even if you’ve condemned me. Nathalie has the code.”

“Dad, what are you talking about?” Adrien asks. He doesn’t look at whatever metal object has just been shoved into his hand, because if he takes his eyes off of his dad _ anything _could happen (would someone step in if his dad tried something?).

“Don't let me down. You’ve made it clear that you don’t consider me your father,” Gabriel spits, “but you don’t have to abandon your family.”

“Damn right,” Ladybug suddenly says, and yanks Adrien back upright, onto his feet, breaking Gabriel’s hold on Adrien. Adrien watches as his father is similarly yanked upright by a police officer, cuffs snapped onto his wrists.

“Wait--” Adrien says.

“See you in court,” his father says, almost cordial.

“_ Wait! _ Could you just _ explain _\--” Adrien pleads, but Gabriel is already being folded into the back of a police car. 

“Adrien,” Ladybug says, to get his attention, but Adrien shrugs her off and runs after his father, saying, “Dad, I don’t understand--”

Gabriel twists to look, but the car door closes. Adrien gets close enough to try and call out to him, but someone else throws out an arm and catches him around the middle, interrupting all his momentum.

It’s the Gorilla that has him, and he lifts Adrien completely off the ground with ease. Adrien goes completely boneless, worming out of the grip and hitting the ground running, just in time for the police car to peel out of its parked spot, and take Gabriel with it.

Adrien slows to a stop, and then doubles over in defeat, intending to rest his hands on his knees, but his body feels too heavy and he ends up kind of falling to the ground. 

Ladybug shouts, “_ Hey _,” but nobody is fast enough to catch him, and Adrien ends up in a pathetic ball on the street with his forehead pressed to his knees.

It’s over.

He doesn’t know what happens after that. Maybe he passes out, but it doesn’t feel like it--he still catches snippets of what’s happening. He mainly processes the feeling of the object in his hand pressing into his skin, and the scrape of asphalt as someone else makes him sit up, and the floaty feeling of being carried.

“Is he hurt?” someone asks. 

“I’m fine,” Adrien mumbles, and opens his eyes, and turns to whoever’s closest--it’s Alya--and he asks, “Is Ladybug okay?”

“Ladybug’s fine,” Alya says, furrowing her eyebrows because it’s ridiculous that _ that’s _ what Adrien’s asking. She says something else, but Adrien has already disconnected again, and he can’t hear her.

The next thing he’s aware of is the ceiling of the living room. It’s intact, and the whole bakery’s intact, and when he slowly turns his head to see Nino and Alya and Marinette and Marinette’s parents clustered around him, he sees that everyone else seems fine, too. _He’s _the one that’s a mess, he reminds himself.

“Hey, kid,” Tom says, with a warm but cautious tone, like he isn’t sure what’s going to set Adrien off.

“Hi,” Adrien says. His voice sounds steady, even though he’s feeling everyone’s eyes track every small move he makes. “Sorry, I was totally zoning out.”

Nino lets out a surprised laugh, but Adrien sees that he’s crying.

Adrien sits up, eyebrows scrunched together. “Is everything okay?”

“Dude, shut up,” Nino says, and sits on the edge of the couch to drag Adrien into a hug. Adrien falls into it, automatic, attempting to be enveloped by Nino’s sweatshirt (one of his hands is still holding the thing from his dad, he realizes vaguely).

Something different happens, then. Instead of Adrien having to say a word, Sabine says, “Oh, you probably want some space, right?”

Adrien peeks one eye out to look at her, surprised.

Sabine smiles, gentle, and she doesn’t look annoyed at all. “Join us for dinner if you’d like, but we’ll save a plate for you.” She glances around at the others surrounding Adrien, and they all seem to agree--and Adrien is suddenly alone with Nino. 

“That was weird,” Adrien says, his voice muffled by Nino’s hoodie.

“What, that we finally tried to think about how _ you’re _feeling?” Nino asks. He’s running a soft hand up and down Adrien’s back. Adrien’s pretty sure he’s still crying, too.

“Uh,” Adrien says. 

Nino cups a hand on the back of Adrien’s head. “I’m really proud of you, dude.”

“Okay,” Adrien laughs, but then he cuts the laugh off because it sounds jittery and flustered. “Nino, I. Thanks. For uh, putting up with this.”

“Hey. The faster we get the court thing over with, the more likely you can come on the school ski trip this year,” Nino snorts. “Of _ course _I’m gonna ‘put up with this.’”

“Is that really what this has all been about?” Adrien asks.

“Uh, _ yeah _ ,” Nino says. (Adrien doesn’t call him out for lying, because they _ both _remember fourteen-year-old Nino pulling fourteen-year-old Adrien into the bathroom and staring at Adrien’s bruised arms and tearfully asking if Adrien wanted to call the police.) “You’ve never gone with us.”

“Interesting,” Adrien says. He tightens his grip on Nino, and Nino does the exact same back to him.

Nino eventually rotates out with Alya, though it’s probably less because Nino is tired of doing his Protective thing and more because Alya is eager to talk to Adrien. Adrien figures this, because Alya hardly even greets Adrien before she says, “Hey. You aren’t still feeling guilty about going to the police, right?”

“_ Alya _,” Nino admonishes from the kitchen.

“Leave me alone!” Alya says back, and looks to Adrien expectantly.

Adrien thinks about it. (His dad hadn’t thought twice about burning down buildings full of people, and trying to kill Chat Noir and Ladybug, and he’d even seemed to drop the act of caring about Adrien at all towards the end, kind of.)

“I guess not?” Adrien says, because that’s as sure as he can be right now.

“Judging by the fact that he got akumatized _ twice _trying to find you, he wouldn’t have stopped until he was sure you kept your mouth shut,” Alya says, matter-of-fact.

Adrien hiccups, and almost laughs. “That’s...not a bad point.”

“I know.” Alya taps Adrien’s closed fist. “What’s that?”

“Oh. Nothing,” Adrien says, and twists a little in order to be able to shove whatever it is into his pocket. It doesn't feel like it's something he wants other people to know about just yet, for some reason. “Just a lucky charm.”

“Fanboy,” Alya says, but she has a look on her face like she’s trying to figure out how to sneak something out of Adrien’s jean pocket without him knowing.

Adrien sits at dinner with everyone else. He doesn’t eat much, but nobody calls attention to it (or maybe someone calls him on it, and he’s too out of it to notice, and so nobody brings it up again).

Either way, it’s surprisingly peaceful. There’s some anxious energy at the beginning of the meal, given that the bakery was melted into lava about an hour ago, but everyone seems to be willing to forget about that for the moment.

As the meal progresses, Adrien slips further and further away. He feels Nino’s elbow brush his a couple times, and the metal object from his dad is digging into his thigh, and he vaguely sees that Marinette is across the table from him, chatting animatedly with Alya, but that’s all he notices. The past couple of weeks are catching up to him now even more than when he’d broken down on Marinette.

He can’t keep wallowing, though. Now that his dad’s definitely going to trial (and there’s not a reason for Adrien to be scared and pathetic all the time), he’s going to have to start being a regular person again.

Maybe he’ll get a new job? So he’ll be able to pay rent, at least, for the Dupain-Chengs. Or maybe he’ll just have to leave altogether, now that there’s not a reason for him to stay. Adrien can’t guarantee that they’ll still want him here, after he’s caused their home to be destroyed twice in a week. 

Adrien, with herculean effort, pulls himself back to the present, and finds that everyone is done eating, and they’re clearing the table around him.

“You must be tired,” Sabine says, and puts a hand on his shoulder. “You’re falling asleep sitting up.”

Adrien’s exhausted. He doesn’t know what to say. His vision, embarrassingly, is tunnelling to a point where he can only see Sabine’s gentle hand touching him. “I think I should go back to school tomorrow. It’s the last day before break," he manages.

Tom says, from the direction of the kitchen, “I see where you’re coming from, but you could also just ask your friends to get your assignments.”

“Yeah, we could get those for you,” Alya agrees. “You don’t need to push yourself.”

“I want to see everyone,” Adrien insists. He wants things to go back to some semblance of normal, even if it’s just school. “It’ll be fine.”

“Let’s talk again after you’ve gotten some sleep,” Sabine says. She’s probably hoping Adrien will forget about this when he wakes up next. 

“Okay,” Adrien says. He doesn’t have an alarm clock. Maybe Sabine is counting on the possibility that he’ll just sleep until noon tomorrow and miss half the school day on accident. “Marinette, will you--”

“I’ll wake you up,” Marinette promises. “Just please get some sleep, you look like you’re a dead person right now.”

Adrien snorts. He rubs his eyes. Nino helps him stand up. 

When Adrien finally makes it downstairs, twenty minutes late for when he and Marinette were supposed to leave for school, he sees a veritable flock of reporters outside, all flashing cameras and clunky microphones.

Adrien’s chest seizes up, and he stops abruptly enough that Marinette crashes into him. His scruffy school-wear is _ not _ what he should be wearing for his first press interview on the subject, and if he’s not with a group of friends, the him-and-Marinette situation could _ also _look like something to write about. Plus, if he looks too happy, or too annoyed, it might affect his case (Therese had said it was okay for him to just act like how he felt, and Adrien’s still kind of freaked out about not being given a specific role to play. It’s a little too much freedom right now).

What?” Marinette asks, annoyed, but then she sees what _ he’s _seen, and she says, “Shit. Okay. Uh. Back door!”

Adrien lets her grab his hand and yank him along, and then she’s shoving him out of the back door into the alleyway where the delivery truck comes in the mornings. 

“I’ll deal with it,” she promises, and smiles brightly. “Meet you at the park.”

Adrien, hesitant, smiles back. “Okay. Thanks.”

Marinette’s face gets a little red, and she waves her hand around, and she says, “Yeah. I’ll see you in like ten minutes.” Then she slams the door in his face, and Adrien takes off running.

Once he’s a few blocks away, he slows to a walk, and is crossing the street to wait in the park when Marinette catches up to him, screeching to a stop on her bike, her hair just a little windswept. “Slowpoke,” she says. “We’re going to be so late.”

“Sorry,” Adrien says (it had been because Sabine and Tom kept fussing over him that they were late, because both of Marinette’s parents have developed a psychic sense for Adrien’s self-destructive behaviors and they were worried he was pushing himself too far. He just wanted to get all of his missed assignments before break started, and he’d promised to come home if he started freaking out).

Marinette says, “Here, get on.”

“Where?” Adrien asks. Marinette’s bike has a rack on the back wheel, but Adrien is pretty sure it won’t support his weight.

“Handlebars,” Marinette says. She glances over her shoulder, like maybe some reporters could be trailing after her, and Adrien gets the hint.

“We’re going to crash,” Adrien says, but he goes to the front of the bike and awkwardly hops on, clutching the handlebars like his life depends on it. “Can you even see?”

“Lift your elbow up a little,” Marinette says, and she leans sideways, peering through the window between Adrien’s arm and his ribcage. “Okay. This should be fine.”

“I’m too heavy,” Adrien tries to tell her. His backpack keeps brushing her face.

"It’s fine,” Marinette insists, to convince both of them, and she kicks off and starts to pedal. The bike wobbles, dipping to one side so badly that Adrien makes the most undignified squeaking noise ever, but then she corrects their balance and begins to get momentum. He’d forgotten how inexplicably strong Marinette is.

“_ Lightpost _ !” Adrien shrieks, and Marinette swerves to avoid it, laughing her face off. A few days ago, Adrien had stared his father-also-lava-monster in the eye and shot him with fire hydrant water, and _ that _ was less nerve-wracking than this. “Marinette, we’re going to _ die _,” he says over his shoulder, and finds that she doesn’t look worried at all.

“It’s fine!” Marinette says again, and she’s still laughing--probably because Adrien is clinging to where her hands are steady on the handlebars. 

The ride isn’t smooth by any means, but Marinette gets more and more confident as they go. The bakery isn’t far from the school, but Adrien has never realized how danger-fraught Marinette’s walk to school is. They have to avoid several other bicyclists, the Seine, and more than a few trees. Adrien’s never been more stressed out in his life.

“Have you never done this before?” she asks, when it’s been five minutes and Adrien still hasn’t stopped cringing away from every obstacle in their path.

“Uh--_ no _ !” Adrien glances over his shoulder at her, as briefly as he can so that he can go back to making sure they don’t hit anything. “Have _ you _?”

“No,” she says, and extricates a hand from the handlebars so she can poke Adrien in the side. The bike wobbles, and Adrien shrieks again. “I saw it in a movie once, though.”

“We’re going to die,” he says again.

“Bet,” Marinette says, and swerves to a stop. Adrien almost flies off the front of the bike, but she balls a hand in his sweater and keeps him on the handlebars through sheer muscle.

They’re in front of the school, he realizes, once he’s cracked his eyes open.

“Only three minutes late!” Marinette says, proud. 

Adrien eases himself off the handlebars and lands on shaky legs. He tries to regain his balance while Marinette locks her bike up, and then Marinette’s pulling him behind her to run inside the building before the doors were locked for the day. He supposes that she’s more experienced being late than he is.

“I--need to stop in the locker room,” Adrien says, kind of breathless. The reminder that he’s about to see all of his classmates at once, and they’re all going to be staring right at him, is a lot. 

Marinette frowns, but she nods, absentmindedly pushing her hair back into its proper place. “Okay. Well, I’m gonna head to class. I’ll tell them you’re on your way.”

“Okay,” Adrien says. He turns the corners of his mouth up in a photoshoot smile, to put her at ease. He just needs a minute to breathe.

He sits on the bench in the locker room and takes careful breaths for a few minutes. It’s going to be fine. Nobody in the class will freak out (probably). Except Chloe, who will completely freak out (definitely). 

“You could totally skip today and nobody would care,” Plagg says. “You’ve earned it!”

"Thanks,” Adrien says, and leans over so he’s essentially folded in half, his face pressed into his knees. “It’s just one day, though,” he mumbles, “I can get through it.”

Something in his pocket is pressing into his thigh. Impatiently, he digs it out, and suddenly remembers the object his dad had forced on him during the last akuma battle. In the rush of trying to make sure everyone was fine, he’d completely forgotten about it.

It’s a brooch, it looks like. Four grey wings and a purple stone in the middle.

“Kid,” Plagg says. His voice is suddenly sharp, cold. Afraid. 

“It’s--” Adrien blinks at it. He _ knows _what it is, but his brain is preventing him from forming the words, the mere thought of it. “I need to get to class.”

“No, let’s deal with this,” Plagg says. “Your old man gave this to you, right?”

“It’s fine,” Adrien says. His mind is automatically shutting down all thoughts of _ where did he get this why did he have this. _He’s very good at compartmentalizing, when he needs to be. “I’ll just--deal with it after class.”

He gets up and leaves the locker room, and shoves the brooch back into his pocket. Plagg trails after him, muttering, but there’s not much else he can do.

On the desk next to Adrien’s twitchy hand, Nino nudges his phone over. Twitter’s open, and the phone is displaying a tweet from one of Adrien’s fan accounts. There are two slightly blurry pictures from this morning, of Adrien clinging to the handlebars and both he and Marinette are caught mid-laugh. The street signs are scribbled out with red ink, like the person had taken care to make sure nobody could figure out where they were taken. Adrien’s eyes are shut in both of the pictures, but he looks...

@adricnagrcstc Tweeted: ok i’m not putting a location stamp for OBVS reasons but can i JUST SAY… adrien riding on MARINETTE DUPAIN CHENG’S BIKE living his fucking best life while his asshole dad’s in custody...iconique, some would say

Adrien can’t stop staring at the photos. He looks so _ different _. He hasn’t seen an unedited published photo of himself in what feels like years.

“Do you follow _ fan accounts about me on Twitter _,” Adrien hisses to Nino, but he can’t stop the smile that’s starting on his face. This new information is enough to distract him from the impending doom he was feeling earlier.

“Only a few,” Nino says, and coolly puts his phone back in his pocket. “You never send me selfies anymore.”

“I don’t have a phone--” Adrien tries to say, but they’re interrupted by their teacher clearing her throat at the front of the room.

They sit in silence, with perfect posture, taking diligent notes (or at least appearing as if they’re taking notes) until the teacher is satisfied that they’re paying attention, at which point Nino whispers, “Can I retweet it?”

Adrien glances around the room. Nobody had even flinched when he’d walked in (besides Chloe, who had pulled her usual theatrics). Even now, nobody’s staring at him, cataloguing his every move. Only two photos of him on his way to school is actually a marked improvement from the way it used to be. His life’s about to be even more of a shitshow for the next couple of weeks, so Nino retweeting some photos of Adrien where Adrien’s at a healthy weight and is hysterically laughing his head off in the face of imminent bike crash isn’t a bad thing at all.

“I guess,” Adrien says, and sighs longsufferingly, and he smiles. It feels real.


End file.
